Tag Archives: literary fiction

Redemption Road, by John Hart ***-****

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redemptionroadJohn Hart has  loyal readers, but until a friend mentioned his name to me I had not read his work. Thanks go to Net Galley and St. Martin’s Press for the DRC, which I received free in return for an honest review. This title is available to the public May 3, 2016. There are some partial spoilers below that give up events midway through the book, but of course the ending is kept secret so that you may find it for yourself. I rate this novel 3.5 stars and round upward.

Our protagonist is Elizabeth Black, a cop burdened by her profound attachment to Adrian Wall, a former cop sent to prison for a murder she is certain he did not commit, and also to Gideon, the child of the murder victim. On the day Wall is released from prison, Gideon, now an adolescent, lies in wait for him, prepared to shoot the man he believes killed his mother.

All hell breaks loose, and once more Liz is immersed in the case. She has served as surrogate mother to Gideon since his mother’s death; his father is not fit to raise a child, and so she has quietly slipped in and out of that family’s home, preparing meals, purchasing the child’s clothes. She can’t step back from this case, even when ordered by her superiors to do so.

Hart is a gorgeous prose stylist, and his pacing is unbeatable. He does use one very old plot device, and it, along with the subscript, which I will discuss in a minute, and the absolutely impossible denouement are the reasons the final star-and-a-half is denied.  In addition, there is a place in the story—I won’t spoil the specifics—in which Liz is stark naked and leaps into a car without a stitch of clothing on, and no one finds this remarkable. It appears that the writer had intended to get her dressed and overlooked this detail, as did editors.Hart’s facility with setting is lush and matchless; the violence in this novel, thoroughly visceral, tipped my “ick” button a couple of times, and for this reason and others, I may not return to his work. But his talent and skill are unquestionable.

A minor character of considerable interest is the attorney Liz hires to defend those close to her, a very elderly local courtroom legend known as Crybaby Jones. Every time Crybaby said or did anything, my mind lit up like Christmas, it was so endearing and entertaining. I wish he had been given a larger role in the story, but for the most part he was relegated to the sidelines.

Another character of interest is the prison warden, who functions as a local kingpin and terrorizes those around him into instant submission. I disliked the way this character was shaped, because it gave the author a handy way to dismiss the over-the-top violence by local cops and prison guards as the product of one terrible man’s dominance, which gives the reader the false but comforting assurance that when cops get bad, it’s an anomaly. Hart may believe this; I don’t. And this is a part of the subscript that grated on my nerves. Early in the story Liz reflects that it is oh so hard to be a cop “since Ferguson”, sounding the message that those of us that hold cops accountable and question the deaths of children and other weaponless civilians is cruelly unfair to those that wield the badge. My e-reader comment: “Oh boo hoo. Poor poor cops.”

Because this writer spins a good thriller, I attempted to overlook this and another troubling aspect of the subscript, but the second message was hammered home again, and again, and again, the message that any woman that terminates a pregnancy is a baby killer. He goes after this one long and loudly, with Liz recalling the day she “killed her baby” in a sleazy trailer park abortion. If we’d just had the trailer and no other abortion reference it could have been interpreted as a message that abortion should be safe and legal in every state in the USA, including North Carolina, but that is clearly not the author’s intent. He has her tearfully remembering what would have been her due date had she delivered the “child”; she marks her embryo’s birthday-that-wasn’t every year, and mawkishly speculates about what he –oh yes, she knows its gender, although this is not even scientifically possible until the fifth month of a pregnancy– might have liked, his possible activities, preferences, and yada yada.

Have you had an abortion, or known someone that has? I can think of half a dozen women without trying hard, and this is just not how it goes, folks. Nor should it be.

Fiction writers often use story to drive home a political message, because story is such a strong device and delivers such powerful feelings. In the hands of friends, it is admirable and welcome. In the hands of those that wish to dictate what a woman may or may not do with her body, and in the hands of those that would restore the status quo of police terror over Black men and other vulnerable members of our society, it is galling.

To sum up, Hart has created a work of stunning prose and imagery and tremendous suspense. If you lean far enough to the right to be unaffected or even galvanized by the subscript, then this is your book.

The Fat Artist and Other Stories, by Benjamin Hale*****

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thefatartistI like short stories. My Goodreads library tells me I have munched my way through 89 collections and anthologies; yet I can tell you that there is nothing even remotely similar to what Hale offers here. Thanks go to Simon and Schuster and Net Galley for permitting me to view the DRC for the purpose of an honest review. You should get a copy May 17, 2016 when it is released, so that when it is immediately banned by various school boards you will know what they’re screaming about.

The ribbon that binds these brilliant, bizarre tales is that each of them features a social outlier as a protagonist. We start with the airline flight from hell in “Don’t Worry Baby”; you have doubtless flown at least once on a flight with a small child whose mother you long to smack upside the head for her dreadful parenting skills, but this one wins the prize. The second story that deals with Judgment Day didn’t work for me; first there were some hyperliterate science references that zinged right over my head, and then the sick factor got the better of me, and so I skipped that one and moved on to the title story. Having read the rest, I am inclined to chalk that second one up to my own quirks rather than Hale’s skill set.

When I came to “The Fat Artist”, I could only bow in awe. I was overcome with frustration because no one else in my household enjoys literary fiction, and so I couldn’t share. In a nutshell, the protagonist, a performance artist, seeks to eat himself to death while setting a worldwide fatness record. I actually gasped several times while reading this one.

Although the writing within this collection provides outstanding examples of every imaginable literary device, those that teach high school literature would be wise not to place it on classroom shelves unless you work at an alternative school. A very alternative school. A very, very, very…well, hopefully my meaning is clear. There is so much edgy material, from language, to explicit sexual description, to sexual roles and gender ambiguity, that I can see the villagers coming with their torches, their hot tar, their feather pillows. Teachers, don’t do this to yourselves. Get a personal copy; take it home and enjoy it; then pass it on to someone that can be trusted to appreciate it. Seriously.

Four more stories follow, and they’re all strong. “Leftovers” deals with a middle aged man in the midst of an extramarital affair when his problem child unexpectedly appears, ready to ransack the family vacation home for valuables to sell in order to feed his addiction. The way this tale unfolds gives me goose bumps.

The next two tales deal with sexual roles and ambiguity. I came away from “Beautiful Boy”, which made me realize, whether by the author’s intention or not, that men that choose to cross dress only as a diversion are looking at the best of both worlds, never having to confront the glass ceiling because they’ll be at that office meeting clad in their conservative suit and tie like always; it reminds me of white actors that wore black face.

The final story of a troubled brother that lands in the basement of his brother, the MIT researcher, and is provided with a job driving squid from the docks to the laboratory, is as brilliant as all the others, and equally esoteric.

Hale is wholly original, but if I were to compare his writing to any other author, it would be to that of Michael Chabon.

Bring your literary skills to the feast that Hale has laid for you; you will need them.  It’s one hell of a banquet.

The Girls, by Emma Cline*****

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thegirlsThe Girls is a fictionalized account of the Manson Murders, a terrible killing spree that stunned the USA in the 1960s before any mass shootings had occurred, when Americans were still reeling from the assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother, Senator Robert Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King. Manson, a career criminal with a penchant for violence yet possessed of a strange sort of charisma, attracted a number of young women and girls into a cult of his own founding. Later they would commit a series of grisly murders in the hills outside Berkeley, and it is this cult and these crimes on which Cline’s story is based. Great thanks to Net Galley and Random House for the DRC. This book will be published June 14, 2016.

Evie is an only child of the middle class; she is well provided for, but her parents have split up and her presence is getting in the way of her mother’s love life. Evie needs her mother’s attention now that she has entered her teens and so she pushes the limits in small ways, then in larger ones. When it becomes clear that her mother just doesn’t want her around, Evie looks elsewhere and finds herself drawn to a feral-looking young woman named Suzanne, who has unsuccessfully tried to shoplift something from a nearby store. Before long, Evie is sleeping on a mattress at the rural commune where Suzanne lives, eating from the communal kitchen and being used sexually by the group’s charismatic leader, and then by a man in the music industry that Russell, the founder, wants to please in the hope of having his music published.  Russell dispenses hallucinogenic drugs freely to make the girls more compliant.

We know immediately that this place, the commune, is not a good place. When we find that the babies  born to young women that live there—in this era before Roe versus Wade gave women the right to choose—are segregated from their young mothers and the pitiful way they regress and attempt to attach themselves to various females in search of a mother or mother figure, that’s a huge tell. But when Evie arrives she doesn’t want to know these things, at least not yet. All Evie wants is to be with Suzanne.

The story’s success isn’t anchored so much in the story line, a story that’s been tapped by previous writers, but in the dead-accuracy of setting, both the details of the time and in every other respect as well, from home furnishings, to slang, to clothing, to the way women were regarded by men. The women’s movement hadn’t taken root yet. This reviewer grew up during this time, and every now and then some small period bit of minutiae sparks a memory. In fact, the whole story seems almost as if a shoebox of snapshots from pre-digital days had been spilled onto the floor, then arranged in order.

The other key aspect that makes this story strong is the character development. Evie doesn’t have to live in poverty among bad people, but she feels both angry at her mother and hemmed in by the conventional expectations of her family and friends. Her boundary-testing costs her the loyalty of her best friend, really her only friend, and so she casts about for a new set of peers. Her mother prefers the fiction that she is still visiting Connie, the friend that has disowned her, and this lie provides Evie with a lot of wiggle room on evenings when her mother is with her boyfriend and finds it convenient for Evie not to be home.

As for Evie, what has started out to be an adventure, a bold experiment in branching out from the middle class suburban life she’s always known, gradually begins to darken. But the worse things get, the more important it is to her to prove her fealty to Suzanne, to not be rejected a second time as she was with Connie. Hints are dropped that probably she ought to just go back where she came from before it’s too late, but she is determined not to hear them.  I want to grab her by the sleeve and get her out of there; Evie won’t budge. Once she is in trouble at home for the things she had done on behalf of the group, her desire to avoid her home and stay with Suzanne grows even stronger, which leads her into more trouble yet. Clues are dropped that something big is going to happen, something that our protagonist maybe should avoid, but she plunges forward anyway with the bullheaded determination peculiar to adolescence.

All told, Evie’s future doesn’t look good.

Readers among the Boomer generation will love this book for its striking accuracy; those that are younger will feel as if they have traveled to a time and place they have never seen before. One way or another, Cline’s masterful storytelling weaves a powerful spell that doesn’t let go until the last page is turned. Riveting, and highly recommended.

Work Like Any Other, by Virginia Reeves****

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worklikeanyotherReeves makes her debut here with a deeply moving, haunting tale of a man that tries to do the right thing and finds his entire life miserably, horribly gone wrong instead. Thank you to Net Galley and Scribner for the DRC; this book is available for purchase March 1, 2016.

Roscoe marries Marie, the woman of his dreams, a woman that speaks little but recognizes every bird call in the state of Alabama. When her father dies, he gives up being an electrician, work that he loves, in order to move to the farm they inherit. Unlike his father-in-law, Roscoe’s own father has always looked down on farming as a poor man’s last resort. Roscoe thinks he has found a compromise by bringing electricity, and with it mechanized farm tools, to Marie’s father’s farm; he won’t have to sweat in the fields, and he has found a way to continue doing the work her prefers. Pirating electricity from the lines out on the highway is against the law, but it’s nothing to make a man do hard time. If he is discovered, he’ll pay a fine and the electric company will install a meter. No harm, no foul.

That’s what he thinks, anyway.

Everything goes to hell in the blink of an eye when someone dies grabbing hold of a live wire located on his improvised set up. He is charged with manslaughter; with a halfway decent attorney, he should be able to get the sentence suspended or reduced, since no harm was intended, but Marie chooses not to hire anyone to represent him. She tells the state to give him a court appointed attorney, and instead she pays for an attorney for the man that has assisted him, knowing that the state of Alabama will come down harder on a Black man, a man that has worked for her family since she was a tiny child.

She can afford two attorneys, as we later learn. It isn’t about the money. It’s about blame. It’s about cold, hard vengeance.

We follow Roscoe as he makes his way through the trial, bewildered not to find Marie in the courtroom. We follow him through his years in prison, a system that tells the public it is there to correct bad habits and teach men skills they can use for the future. It’s a cruel, cold lie. And so although Roscoe’s experience is better in some ways than that of Wilson, who is sent to the end of the prison reserved for men of color, his sentence is much longer, with parole denied again and again as Marie fails to advocate for him.

Reeves is a genius with prose. Were I to rate this book solely on her skill as a writer, this would be a five star review, hands down. The kind of lyrical quality shown here is not a thing that can be taught; at some point, the word smithery put to use here is a matter of talent, and Reeves possesses enough for all Alabama.

My sole concern here is credibility. I don’t want to give too much away because you should read this novel, but I have to say that the way the last portion of the book plays out could never, never occur in the Jim Crow heart of Dixie. One could almost imagine some of it occurring in a different way, one closely guarded and unseen by the community, but to have things set up as they are when Roscoe finally gets out of prison and have the local storekeeper be aware of it, regard it as either normal or as private business that is no concern of his, strains credulity beyond the most magical prose. That house and farm would have been burned to the ground. It could never have happened.

Reeves has developed Roscoe’s character with depth and intimacy, and this is the greatest strength of her story; the first 75% of the plot is also well paced, with tension gently building as a story arc is meant to do. But the spell is broken during the last portion by the problem mentioned above.

Reeves is an author likely to go forward and do great things, and this is a strong debut. Apart from the one distraction mentioned, this book is highly recommended to those that love good fiction.

The Portable Veblen, by Elizabeth Mckenzie*****

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theportableveblen“There is a terrible alchemy coming.”

Veblen has led an insular life, focusing her energies on genealogy, a love of nature, and oh dear heaven, her mother. The fact is, her mother is both dominant to an extreme degree, and frankly more than a little bit squirrely. But when Veblen meets Paul, her life changes dramatically; but even more so than most young women, she finds that she needs to be flexible to accommodate Paul, whose needs are different from her own.

A huge thank you goes to Net Galley and Penguin Random House Publishers for permitting me a DRC. I nearly let this title pass unread by me, thinking, because of the cover art, that it was going to be a cutesy animal story, its humor no doubt cloying. I could not have been more mistaken, and so thanks are also due to whatever journalist’s review was posted in my hometown newspaper. Realizing my error, I rushed to the computer to see if it would still be possible, at this late date, to read it free.

It was indeed.

Dr. Paul Vreeland, neurologist and researcher, seeks some normalcy and order in his life. He was raised in a communal environment by parents determined to avoid the rat race and its social conventions as well. All of them. Had he been raised in an urban environment, someone would have probably called the authorities and had him removed from the filth, the drugs, and oh yes, the dreadful embarrassment. When he meets Veblen, he senses that she is fresh and unpretentious, but does not fully grasp just how much she wants to be like his parents—well, minus the drugs.

When Veblen is under stress, she starts anthropomorphizing squirrels. She is certain she can talk to them and that they understand what she’s saying. The stranger her mother behaves, the more Veblen is drawn to squirrels.

And now, a personal note. A good friend of mine took a respite from the grinding, long hours of social work, and for awhile she worked as a wedding planner. It didn’t last long. Having had so much experience dealing with disparate personalities in her initial career, she often felt the urge to hurl herself between the prospective bride and groom, upon whose union tens of thousands of dollars was being lavished. She wanted to cry out, “Just get away from each other, both of you! This marriage will be over before the year is over, so just don’t go there!”

And this is what I wanted to do as of the 33 percent mark. I wanted to haul Veblen back to the rundown cottage she occupied by preference, and haul Paul back to his state-of-the-art medical facility, and have them never see one another again.

Then again, their relationship is hysterically funny, and all of us can use a good laugh, followed by another, and yet another.

The reader can approach this hugely original tale on one of two levels. It can be read as literary fiction, with the squirrel as metaphor. Or one can just read it, and sit back and howl with laughter.

One way or the other, this unbelievably clever, hilarious book is available for purchase now, and it is highly recommended to everyone.

Where All Light Tends to Go, by David Joy*****

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WhereAllLightTends“Dead men tell no tales, Jacob. The ones left to living are the ones who write the history.”

I received my DRC courtesy of Net Galley and Putnam Penguin publishers in exchange for an honest review. This title is available for purchase.

Jacob McNeely is a teenager in Cashier, North Carolina, a tiny  town deep in the crags and hollows of the Appalachian Mountains. His mother is a crank user recently released against his father’s wishes from a psychiatric hospital. Jacob has always wished she might turn into a real mother, but it isn’t going to happen.

His father is the local drug czar, with cops on his payroll and a wide variety of other employees as well. He uses McNeely’s Auto Garage to launder his drug money. If any clueless tourist should come by, he gives them a quote so outrageous they take their business elsewhere. Locals foolish enough to cross him or get in his way find themselves and their vehicles in a deep, watery grave yard. That’s if the abused, underfed Walker coonhounds that are tied up at intervals throughout his property don’t kill them first.

Jacob walks a careful tight rope just in order to stay alive. He doesn’t like the life he leads, but he doesn’t see a way out. That is, unless he can run away with Maggie, the girl he has loved since childhood. Maggie is cut out for greater things; Maggie should go to college and escape the danger and poverty of Cashier.

If only Jake could go with her.

Joy is a gifted writer. His stark prose is chilling yet poignant, and so arresting that the reader will be hard pressed to set it down once it’s begun. But you may think twice about reading it at bedtime.

Where does all light tend to go? The allegory is heavy but sophisticated. Perhaps all light goes toward heaven, the candle that reminds us of the existence of God.

Or it’s possible that all light just goes out.

Searing, wrenching, and deeply affecting, this is a book to remember long after you’ve forgotten everything else you’ve read. Highly recommended to adults. Definitely not for children or adolescents.

Simply brilliant!

 

The Tin Roof Blowdown, by James Lee Burke*****

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thetinroofblowSometimes people say they “ran across” a book, and that is close to how I came to read James Lee Burke for the first time. I had been tidying up for company, and my daughter had selected this book from the “free” pile at school, then decided she didn’t want it. She is a teenager, so instead of finding our charity box and putting it there, she dropped it on the upstairs banister. I scooped it up in irritation..then looked at it again. Flipped it over…read the blurb about the writer. This man is a rare winner of TWO Edgars. Really? I examined the title again; I hadn’t read any novels based on Hurricane Katrina, so why not give it a shot?

There are about a dozen writers whose novels I will read just because they wrote them. This man is now one of them. I appreciated his ability to develop characters, deal respectfully but realistically with the tragedy and travesty that was Hurricane Katrina (followed by Rita) and recognize it as such; and keep about a million plot threads going without ever dropping anything. In fact, the complexity of the character line-up–somewhere between a dozen and fifteen important people to remember, when I was on the verge of falling asleep for the night–gave me pause, but then this is #6 in a series, so it is possible that if I’d begun with #1, some of them would have been old friends by now, with just a few new ones introduced (and some disposed of before the story was over).

The setting was entirely unfamiliar to me; I have never spent time in the deep southern part of the USA, unless you count a trip with my family to Disney World, and have never set foot in Louisiana. Burke knew it well enough for both of us. His word work was sufficient to lay the canvas before me,and the devastation that was visited upon those who had previously been poor but stable was laid bare:

“They drowned in attics and on the second floors of their houses. They drowned along the edges of Highway 23 when they tried to drive out of Plaquemines Parish. They drowned in retirement homes and in trees and on car tops while they waved frantically at helicopters flying by overhead. They died in hospitals and in nursing homes of dehydration and heat exhaustion, and they died because an attending nurse could not continue to operate a hand ventilator for hours upon hours without rest.”

He gave due credit to those who, in an official capacity or otherwise, worked tirelessly for up to 72 hours on end to save the lives of the vulnerable who had been unable to get out in time, or whose parents had made the wrong choice for them. But he also tells the truth about the condition of the levee that was supposed to protect the residents of New Orleans, and how it had been permitted to deteriorate, when Federal funds were dropped by 50% without a moment’s notice or explanation, and permitted to deteriorate worst in the Black part of town. The narration spills out with disgust the “latent racism…that was already beginning to rear its head.”

Meanwhile, our hero, cop Dave Robicheaux, is trying to find out the whereabouts of a “junkie priest” who perished trying to evacuate his parishioners, but died in the flood waters when criminals stole his boat. He also keeps track of his best friend Clete, a bail bondsman and private detective who will follow him around if he is not included in the search, because some of the people Robicheaux is trying to locate are also bail skippers, and therefore also his bread and butter. Clete is an alcoholic and makes some really bad decisions; Robicheaux tirelessly tries to keep him under his wing and under control, all the while also trying to keep his wife and daughter safe from a local mercenary he’s investigating. The bad guy knows that Robicheaux’s family is his greatest treasure, and threatens them as an attempt to make him back off.

While parts of New Orleans appear untouched by Katrina, others have had their entire infrastructures destroyed, and there are virtually no navigable roads; the waters are treacherous as well, with downed power lines and debris just below the surface. In short, he has his work cut out for him.

Burke’s bad guys are complicated characters. All come from hideous family situations, and childhood has left its unalterable mark on them, but they are layered in the depths to which they will stoop in seeking wealth, power, or simply revenge. One is capable of property crime, violence, even rape, but finds he cannot look an unarmed man in the eye and shoot him; another can do it without a hitch in his heartbeat. The street smart voices I heard within these chapters felt real to me.

But the consistent thread which lies at the core of the story, of the storm, of everything that takes place between its covers, is one which the writer has hold of like a pit bull with a rat. He has his jaws around it and shakes it without ever letting loose of it, whatever other events weave in and out of his pages, the racism that caused the most harm to be brought upon those with the fewest resources, intentionally and maliciously. He will not let go of the racism that rules New Orleans.

“The original sympathy for the evacuees from New Orleans was incurring a strange  transformation. Right wing talk shows abounded with callers viscerally enraged at the fact evacuees were receiving a onetime two-thousand-dollar payment to help them buy food and find lodging. The old southern nemesis was back,naked and raw and dripping–absolute hatred for the poorest of the poor.”

I can see why this guy has a pair of Edgars to bookend his mantel. He spins a compelling, absorbing tale, and the values and priorities that lay at the core of his work are ones I share and appreciate. It was in reading this novel that I became a die-hard James Lee Burke fan. I wrote this review before I had a blog on which to put it, and this book is a must-read for those that love good fiction, good mysteries, or that care about social justice.

Miller’s Valley, by Anna Quindlen*****

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MillersValeyMiller’s Valley is an intimate, poignant story so personal that it is hard to remember that it’s fiction rather than a memoir. Thanks to Net Galley and Random House for the DRC. Though I usually read several DRC’s at a time, this was the one I saved for the end of the day, for that time when the phone stops ringing, the dogs quit barking, the family doesn’t need my attention, and there’s nobody at the front door. During those deep, silent hours I immersed myself into the life of Mimi Miller, hypnotized as if my best friend were perched on the bed spilling out her secrets.

If you love good literary fiction, you have to read this book!

The Millers are a family of working farmers. Day by day, inch by inch, water is claiming their land. Shifty business is going on between a developer, who wants to build and sell a waterfront community in what is now rural land containing farms and woods, and the government, which is interested in increasing the size of the local dam. Visitors come to all land owners in the valley, slick people ready to wheel and deal, threaten and cajole.

The Millers are having none of it.

The reader sees all of this through the eyes of Mary Margaret “Mimi” Miller, who grows up amid the tension, the resistance to the governmental takeover of their land, and the pride…above all, the pride. Her family mucks out the mud when the floods come, and they persevere. They resign themselves to the notion that wall-to-wall carpeting can never happen because water comes into the house so often. You can shovel the muck off of wood or linoleum, but a carpet would be ruined the first time the flood came.

Woven in and out of her story is that of her family members and closest friends, including reclusive Aunt Ruth, her mother’s sister who lives in a separate house on the property. Ruth is agoraphobic, and would not come out of her house if she believed it to be on fire. Ruth says that getting out of the house is “overrated”. We also see her older brother, Eddie, who is “the glory of Miller’s Valley”, the perfect son who goes off to college and makes good; we also follow her other brother Tommy into a host of trouble, trouble, and more trouble.

We view each setting as individual snapshot; she paints it, and we are there. Character development is likewise outstanding. As Mimi grows older, we see the same characters with deeper layers of complexity, just as our understanding of those around us grows fuller and deeper as we age. And as she grows into her adulthood, Mimi becomes so similar to her mother in so many ways that I have to remind myself continually that this is fiction, not memoir.

Quindlen is a veteran writer, and when I started to pass this galley by, I realized it was for a foolish reason: I had been required to read her essays and stories sometimes in teachers’ workshops, and so when I ran across her name, my instinctive response was to associate it with work. But those required-readings were some of the best workshops I ever sat through, and now that I am reading on my own time, I find her novel suits me down to the ground.

And I agree with Mimi’s conclusion that “Maybe everyone stays the same inside.”

Those that love good literary fiction as well as stories of finding ourselves through our heritage will appreciate this beautifully told story as much as I did. It is available for purchase April 5, 2016. Highly recommended.

Pilgrims: A Lake Wobegon Romance*****

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PilgrimsOh my stars. Keillor is at his finest here. I’ve never read anything funnier. Every now and then I permit myself to read a title that isn’t a new release but that I’ve been considering reading for a long time. This is one of those.

By now you probably have an idea whether or not you are a Keillor buff. His appeal is largely (but not limited to) the boomer generation. His trademark capacity to satirize people from rural Minnesota, and in particular Lutherans and Norwegians and most of all himself, is legend. He somehow manages to tug the heartstrings occasionally and evoke bittersweet feelings that are experienced by those of us who grew up in the USA during a particular time period, even if we are not from his part of the nation or his culture.

Keillor seemed to me to be sort of a hit-or-miss writer for awhile, but lately, he’s been hitting, at least for me. Liberty, Pontoon, and this one, which parodies Chaucer’s pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales, carries on without slowing or hitching or ceasing to be interesting and at many times (especially the end) a total crack-up.

If you have never read Chaucer and don’t intend to, that won’t wreck it. The basic contours: Chaucer wrote about people going far away, in a limited group, and Keillor uses the same style of poetry Chaucer used to mark the beginning and end of this book. If there are other parallels, then I am not deep enough to find them, but if I found this to be a good bedside read with only that much recollection, then it will likely suffice for you too.

Here are the story’s components. (I actually flagged fifteen hilarious passages, and then realized that if I quoted them here, it would ruin it to you, so I’ll just give you the basics and set you free.) Margie is 53 and very unhappy. Life has sort of ground to a dull halt; the nest is empty, and husband Carl has moved to a different bedroom. She doesn’t know why. She hopes that if they take a romantic trip to Italy, it will rekindle the flame.

Writer Gary Keillor comes to town. No one includes him in anything. They all assume he is being standoffish by not coming, and he is hurt that no one invites him; very Scandinavian. Before he knows it, he has livened up the speech he is giving (and which is obviously boring his audience senseless) by offering to fund the trip to Italy. Holy smokes! What has he done?

On top of all of it, the town hero, Gussie, their fallen Norwegian soldier who fought in World War II, should have his grave decorated. His daughter Margo, born in Italy outside the sanctity of wedlock, has never gotten around to coming to the USA to meet him, and his remaining brother, very elderly and in a nursing home in another part of the USA, has long wanted someone to convey a photo of Gussie to his grave site. A simple request, and nobody would do it. Now, Margie calls to tell him she’ll be happy to help, and joy of joys, he sends her a big pile of money, and on his deathbed, he refers to her as his “daughter, Margie.” She is entirely untroubled about taking his money as the little band from Lake Wobegon sets out on its vacation and its mission to decorate Gussie’s grave.

This should give you enough information to decide if you want to see the rest. I will only tell you this: the story has some surprises in store at the end; it is not as predictable as it appears to be at the 75% mark.

I found my copy during an annual pilgrimage of my own, to Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon. It has been available to the public for some time.

Hilarious, and highly recommended!

The Children’s Home, by Charles Lambert*****

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thechildrenshomeLambert is a brilliant writer, and his absorbing new novel, The Children’s Home, is the best literary fiction I have read in some time. Thank you to Scribner and Net Galley for the DRC, which I received free in exchange for an honest review.

We start with Morgan, a bitter recluse rattling around in his immense family mansion, afraid to leave its walls for fear someone will see his face and ridicule him. His sister Rebecca runs the family business, and she hires Engel to serve as housekeeper and cook to him. Moira and David are two children that magically appear at his estate. Unlike normal children, they don’t leave messes lying around, whine, or need to be cleaned up; Morgan notices that whenever he wants to concentrate or not have the children around, they seem to vanish, appearing again when wanted.

Motherhood should be so sweet.

But back to the manse. Soon more children come, first in ones and twos, then in waves. Eventually Morgan can’t tell how many children are on his estate. Investigators show up eager to find that he’s breaking the law; they sniff around and leave without seeing anything. And to the burgeoning household a doctor is added. Morgan wants someone discreet and trustworthy to deal with his medical issues, and soon Dr. Crane is not only making house calls, but has a room of his own. And subtly, the power dynamics start to shift. A seismic change is in the wind.

Morgan doesn’t dare leave the estate. At first, the reader believes it is because he is afraid his appearance will be ridiculed, but then others also mention fear for his safety should he leave the walls of his property. And eventually we see the flipside of all this bitter privilege, the big house with the on call servants and medical care. Because someone has to pay in the end; there’s not enough wealth to go around when the few get so much of it, and we learn what is taking place outside those walls. That said, this is not a simple nod to social justice, but a juicy tale full of surprises.

I won’t take you any farther than that, but I must say that Lambert is a writer of undeniable talent. The Children’s Home is brilliant literary fiction. The allegory is a mite on the heavy handed side, but it doesn’t matter when the spell woven is as magical as it is here. I was expecting something along the lines of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, but this is so much more than that.

Parents may want to be aware that there’s a great deal of violence inherent here. For some adolescents, it will be all the more delicious for it, but it is written for an adult audience, and some parents may want to read it themselves before passing it on to younger folk.

When you come down to it, you want to read it anyway. It comes up for sale January 5, 2016, but you can order it now, and you know you want to!