Band of Angels

By Julia Gregson
Touchstone

It might be said that at heart, Band of Angels is a love story. But the course of love between Catherine Carreg and her childhood friend Deio is a convoluted, meandering one. Catherine and Deio grew up riding horses together in Wales in the 1850s. But when Catherine matures, her family puts a stop to her adventures with Deio, seeing it as improper for a young lady. After her mother dies in childbirth, Catherine feels lost and isolated. She wants to go out into the world and study medicine so she can help save lives, as a way to redeem a personal failure that she couldn't save her own mother.

Catherine escapes Wales with the help of Deio, who is a cattle driver. She dresses as a man and goes to London with him on a drive. Upon reaching London, Deio seems to want Catherine to stay with him, but she rejects him outright, refusing to see him after their furtive journey together. Catherine's determination to become a nurse or doctor is rewarded when she is accepted into Florence Nightingale's school for nurses. When Nightingale abruptly leaves for the Crimean war, Catherine begs to go with her.

In the meantime, Deio realizes the railroad will soon make his job as a cattle driver obsolete. Looking for other ways to make a living, he decides to sell horses to the Allied forces in the Crimea. He takes a number of his horses to Balaklava, knowing that Catherine is somewhere near there, and hoping he will find her somehow.

Catherine and Nightingale's other nurses end up in Scutari, far from the front, where thousands of wounded and ill soldiers are hospitalized. Here, they live in squalor, and food is a luxury. Soldiers die of typhus and other diseases more often than they die of wounds suffered on the battlefield. This is the most fascinating part of the story, but it takes more than half the book to get us to this point.

Gregson's research is strong, and she succeeds in making Wales, and the cattle drive to London, come alive for the reader. But there could have been much more about Nightingale and the procedures she used in the hospital in Scutari to offer the reader historical insight. Nightingale is a filmy character here, difficult to relate to, and the war itself seems very distant as well.

It is true that Nightingale has been characterized as standoffish in reality, but still, she had the passion to take her across the world and into hospitals where no women had been allowed before. We don't see much of that drive here. Catherine's motivation for going to the Crimea needed further development, as well. In addition, it seems a bit of a leap when Catherine starts longing for Deio after she so assuredly rejected him. The love story seems almost superfluous at times.

In spite of some plot and character flaws, the book, overall, does succeed in drawing the reader into a brutal world that we want to know more about. This is one of those imperfect books that keeps you reading, looking forward to more like this: “Blood was the hardest thing of all to wash out; all of them wore it like a permanent stain. They spent most of their time on the wards trying to take it from their tangled hair and old bandages, from faces and dolls and pictures and handkerchiefs; strange what the men carried closest to their hearts.”

Review by Natasha Bauman

You

By Nuala Ní Chonchúir
New Island Books

Nuala Ní Chonchúir's début novel tells the tale of a young girl who interprets the life she and her siblings inhabit in their urban Gothic surroundings with simple yet insightful prose. Set against the ominous and symbolic backdrop of the River Liffey, You contrasts the seeming simplicity of the girl's conclusions about her eventful life with the deeper and more complex ramifications of her mother's behaviour.

There is a central, and somewhat obvious, tragedy to Ní Chonchúir's story, and readers who are unfamiliar with her work may see this as the core of the novel itself; however, Ní Chonchúir is a quiet intellect and You is far more complex than the breezy, fast-flowing, colloquial narrative suggests. The real tragedy of You is its framing of society's criterion for a failed woman.

Woman, in all her broken states, is embodied in You's character tour de force, and each has her patriarchal compare. The protagonist's mother takes up with the picaresque Kit, local butcher and lad about town, and in a scene redolent of Joseph Ferdinand Gueldry's The Blood-Drinkers, he takes her a meat offering, which the protagonist turns away from in revulsion. In accepting the bloody gifts, the protagonist's mother is made a prostitute in her daughter's eyes, even if the young girl does not yet know that word, and perhaps an addict in the reader's. The mother's seeming inability to direct her own course in life is a source of consternation to her daughter, yet, in the novel's pivotal scene, it is the inaction of three males that brings about what will be regarded as the books most memorable tragedy.

Ní Chonchúir's skill is her ability to subvert and to break down labels, racism, and sexism included, into their core traits and to show they are seamless, as an estuary. She makes accessible to a wide audience what has often hid in the dense prose of high-end literary fiction and been the seminar agitator of choice for academics. Her prose is both dignifying and empowering to her subjects, and it is her psychological ableness which will mark Ní Chonchúir as a writer of significance.

Review by Rachel J. Fenton

Cross-posted at Melusine

This One Is Mine

By Maria Semple

Back Bay Books

It took me a few days and about 100 pages to feel compelled to read This One Is Mine. Finally, I reached the point when the story could have gone in several directions and I was persuaded to turn each page with anticipation and wondering what would happen next. The story follows the lives of a handful of characters living in Los Angeles and enmeshed in its wealth and superficial façade.

Violet Parry is struggling to find something in her life that makes her feel alive again. She has been married to a successful music producer for years and increasingly she feels he doesn’t hear or care to know her anymore. This is amplified by the fact that she hasn’t worked since her young daughter was born and isn’t sure about her identity. Bringing more confusion is Teddy Reyes, a bass player with a completely different life path. He awakens questions and lust within her that she must navigate throughout the book.

The other main character is Violet’s sister-in-law, Sally. Sally set her sights on an upcoming sports television personality. She believes if she gets him to marry her before his success explodes, it will secure her status and eventually allow her to live the life she wants. Of course, not thinking this plan completely through proves to be a bad move and the situation ends up more complicated than she could have imagined.

There are also some points when the book turns to the point of view of other characters, such as Violet’s husband David or Sally’s ex-boyfriend Kurt. Though it was helpful to see their perspective, the constant switching of first person narratives was a little jarring.

Violet’s husband David turned out to be one of the most complex characters. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to comfort him or hate him. He loved Violet, but didn’t always treat her well. He seemed to grow the most from his experiences and for that I ended up respecting his character.

I believe the book was meant to be a bit of a satire of the poor little rich girl, but I don’t feel it questioned the overly consumer lifestyle of the main characters. Violet consumes without question until she meet Teddy, who happens to be a former junkie that can’t afford to get his car fixed. I appreciate that he isn’t depicted as a stereotypical drug user; the fact that he is an excellent golfer is one thing that helped add depth to his character.

This is Maria Semple’s first novel and it has many strengths. The writing and descriptions are compelling and the dialogue doesn’t seem forced. It’s a good start to Semple’s novel writing career, but it isn’t a book I will be fiercely passing around my circle of friends.

Review by Andrea Hance

Starting from Scratch: A Novel with Recipes

By Susan Gilbert-Collins

Touchstone

In Starting from Scratch, Olivia Tschetter successfully defended her doctoral dissertation and lost her mother all in one day. The youngest of four siblings, Olivia moves back home to be with her father, to run away from her responsibilities at school, and to grieve. Her connection to her mother, who was an incredible cook, is food. At first, she uses food as a way to shove her pain aside, but it eventually becomes one of the ways she gets past her grief.

This is the simplest way to describe a book that is both straightforward and layered at the same time, particularly when revealing those layers would give away all the best parts. Let me just say that it’s easy to enjoy this book on a superficial level—it’s well-written, the characters are easy to relate to, and it’s a quick read—but there are also moments that can be appreciated more deeply.

For example, when Olivia unexpectedly starts with an old friend of her mother’s, Winnie, she stumbles into a minefield of sorts as Winnie reveals secrets Olivia’s family has kept from her. It turns out that Winnie is estranged from her own daughter, and the parallels between the way Olivia is suffering and the way Winnie and her own daughter deal with their own issues are quite compelling. It all reminds the reader that life-changing moments are universal, and that even if we deal with things in our own way, we don’t have to deal with them alone.

Another thing I must point out (again, without giving too much away) is the way this novel pulls off having both food and abuse as its subject matter. It sounds completely absurd, yet Starting from Scratch does it in a beautifully poignant way.

Food is almost like this family’s own language; it’s the way they communicate with each other, for better or worse. As Olivia works to finish the cooking newsletter her mother was working on when she died, the reader is taken through Olivia’s mourning and her reaction to the secrets she’s learned from Winnie. Meanwhile, the way women and their families deal with abuse is at the very heart of this story. Surprisingly, one thing does not take away from the other or make the abuse seem trivial.

In short, Starting from Scratch is a pleasant surprise. I found myself laughing out loud at some parts, and weeping at others. The story sucks you in and it’s over all too soon. By the end, I felt like I was a part of this family, and I wanted desperately to find out what happens to all of them beyond the point at which the story ends.

Review by frau sally benz

Bijou Roy

By Ronica Dhar
St. Martin's Press

Bijou Roy reminded me a bit of Sameer Parekh's Stealing the Ambassador. Both novels feature a young Indian American who visits India after his or her father's death in an attempt to understand the father better, especially his motivation for leaving his home country. Both are quintessential second-generation novels, I feel, because they attempt to recover the lost homeland through a kind of false nostalgia—a desire for a place that was never theirs, but rather of their parents and of the past.

Dhar's novel seemed to try to touch on a number of cultural issues, too, in the contrast between the United States and India in the Indian American's perspective. One example is that Bijou, the title character, is somewhat obsessed with Ketaki, her aunt's maidservant. Bijou sympathizes with this fifteen-year-old and wants to befriend her because the stark class difference of her aunt and uncle from this maid rubs against the ideal of class mobility that she is familiar with having grown up in the United States.

Bijou's name is French for jewel, a word her father picked up when he visited France. He also met Bijou's mother, Sheela, while in France, and this diversion from a more direct India-to-United States path for the parents is interesting for creating a more complex sense of diasporic movement. The France moment in the parents' lives also brings in Billie Holiday as a favorite singer of the father and Bijou (the father first heard Billie Holiday in France as well).

Bijou Roy also has a number of sections from the perspective of the father, Nitish Roy. (The narration is in the third person throughout, though the character's voices emerge in free indirect discourse.) As in Parekh's novel, there is a past (of the father, of the grandfather) haunted by revolutionary and Communist zeal. Nitish was involved with the Naxalites, a revolutionary group that refused Gandhi's nonviolent tactics for social change. I think it's fascinating how newer fiction by Indian Americans (and Indians in the diaspora) seem to be marking a post-independence moment of political contestation rather than the moment of independence from British colonial rule and the trauma of the India-Pakistan split. It definitely seems generational—that the memories of the authors' parents are what make the substance of the fiction.

There was a kind of interesting relationship between Bijou and her younger sister Pari, too. Dhar sketched out subtle differences in how they perceived this trip to India (due perhaps to age difference but also to the different relationships that they had to their parents).

Ultimately, I think Dhar's novel also aims to explore differences in gender norms in the United States versus in India. That exploration isn't fully fleshed out, though, and gets subsumed by the love triangle subplot, which somewhat predictably forces Bijou to puzzle through her relationship with a White American man and her attraction to an Indian man who is the son of a close friend of the father.

Review by Stephen Hong Sohn

Cross-posted at Asian American Literature Fans

A Kind of Intimacy

By Jenn Ashworth

Europa Editions

In Jenn Ashworth’s debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy, the reader follows a few weeks of Annie's life. Annie is not exactly a well person. She doesn’t have much going for her either. Her father was abusive and she married early partly to leave home and partly because she doesn’t have anything better to do. She was lucky, more or less, to have met someone who could support her, who wanted to do so, who was kind, and whose worst faults were tending toward the cheap side of thrifty and wanting to have children.

Eventually the demands of family life get to Annie. She kills her husband and their baby and moves into a new house across town with little more than her cat (to whom she is attached), a trove of self-help books, and a "File" into which she organizes the wisdom from the books into an elaborate system of cross-references she can apply to daily situations. For example, how to get her neighbor’s live-in girlfriend, Lucy, out of the way so that they can realize their destined Great Love. Obviously, this doesn’t go over very well.

The fact that Annie’s perspective on, well, everything is terribly and tragically wrong slips by most of the characters until it is nearly too late. The reader, however, is permitted access to Annie’s mind. At her housewarming party, Lucy, who is young and occasionally manifests the snobbery of youth, opens a bottle of wine, pours it into a glass, swirls it around, sniffs it and then drinks. Annie sees this and wonders, scornfully, “Did she think I was going to poison her or something?” I think, for me, that was when it clicked, when I got my first jolting sense of what it was like to be Annie. The world, for her, is a somewhat bewildering place where everyone but her seems to have attended some secret meeting where they learned all the rituals and understandings that would mark them off as normal, lovable, sane and special. Annie has missed this meeting but believes she knows enough about it to resent it. Annie also doesn’t doubt her grasp on reality and trusts herself to assess the world accurately.

This is an impressive first novel. There are a few editorial errors: a dress (one important to the plot) turns into a pair of jeans and a minor character’s name changes over the course of a few pages. These are insignificant oversights. Ashworth successfully puts her reader in Annie’s place and, amazingly, the reader is able to see the plausibility—from Annie’s perspective—of Annie’s thoughts and judgments. The reader also sees just how wrong Annie gets it, cringes at and for her. I admit, I found the novel a bit stressful sometimes. There was no flaw or shortcoming in the story or its presentation; noting the chasm between Annie’s perspective and my own induced an intense sense of vertigo.

Review by kristina grob

The Bradshaw Variations

By Rachel Cusk
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

In earlier times, a set of variations on a theme in classic art music was a chance for a composer to play around with a melody, try it on in various guises, and allow the audience to hear possibilities. Each variation was minute, an aural petit four to be savored briefly while one contemplated on the sweet yet temporal nature of life. Cusk’s novel The Bradshaw Variations is indeed a set of variations, each chapter holding their own like variations on the theme, offering a brief but blinding insight into life.

Questions of meaning within family, vocation, and sexuality arise as Cusk introduces her reader to the lives of Thomas Bradshaw, his wife Tonie, his daughter Alex, and his two brothers and their families. Thomas, the main character through which most of the action is understood, is taking piano lessons during his interim as a stay-at-home dad. His experiences practicing and learning works by Beethoven and Bach ground the entire novel in a specifically artistic linguistic; Cusk deftly uses musical metaphors throughout the work to create a story that is aural as well as visual and emotional, without succumbing to cliché or cheesy, florid prose.

Thomas, formerly a professional who commuted to work in London like so many other suited desk jockeys, has left his job to stay at home, while his wife Tonie has accepted a position as head of department at a university. Their nontraditional role-switching carries with it consequences for how their family members react and how they negotiate disapproval. Cusk weaves a believable narrative of these very human actors, creating a counterpoint of voices. Both Thomas and Tonie’s parents see the occupational switch as irresponsible and somehow wrong, but are unable to voice the exact nature of their disapproval; furthermore, Thomas feels as if he is in some tired and ambiguous rivalry with both of his brothers, whose temperaments are like night and day. Regardless of the parental disapproval, Thomas finds fulfillment in his days at home, looking after Alexa, playing the piano, and cooking meals. Questions of masculinity are never approached; however, Tonie begins to recognize her own yearning sexuality, and the effects of marriage, age, and work on her own fulfillment. A Freudian theme permeates the novel, apparent in both Thomas’s relationship with his daughter and Tonie’s sense of abandonment, and with Tonie’s own relationship with her father, as viewed through her mother’s eyes. This novel questions what it means to be a family, laying bare the hearts of one in particular and allowing the reader to see their struggles and their moments of connection.

Cusk’s tactile engagement with the characters and their surroundings, coupled with her brilliant use of musical vernacular, create a community of very human characters that I could relate to, over boundaries of class, country, and gender. I read this novel twice, during my morning commutes to work and found myself captivated despite the rush hour bustle.

Review by Cristin Colvin

Bone Worship

By Elisabeth Eslami
Pegasus

After finishing Bone Worship, I wanted to let it sit for a while before I reacted. Full disclosure: Elizabeth Eslami is a friend, and has blessed a book of mine with a glowing review. Situations like this can be awkward, so over the years I’ve developed a de facto policy when I find myself faced with reviewing a work by a friend. Generally speaking, if I find a friend’s book lacking in more respects than is acceptable, I tend not to review it. Fortunately that’s not the case here; Eslami’s debut novel is wonderful.

Jasmine Fahroodhi is a young woman with possibly the worst case of sophomore slump on record, which endures until her parents pick her up at graduation—only a few days after she lets them know she’d flunked out of school. Her father, a Persian-born doctor, seems less rattled by his daughter’s failure in school than by her choice of a major other than pre-med. Jasmine goes home to Georgia with her parents, where her father embarks on his “Plan B” for Jasmine’s future: hastegar, an arranged marriage. Jasmine, as unenthusiastic about home life as she had been at the University of Chicago, musters only the mildest American feminist opposition to this plan.

Dr. Fahroodhi is a classic fish out of water. Opaque even to his family, he is frequently hostile to Jasmine—“you’re stupid” being among his most frequent utterances. Her reluctantly co-dependent mother, born in the Old South, oddly supports her husband’s plans for an arranged marriage, helping him take out “Bride Available” ads in newspapers catering to Iranian-Americans. Jasmine reluctantly goes along with the plan, which—true to the book’s dust-cover teaser—results in humorous and awkward meetings with potential suitors, and then the unexpected happens, though not in the saccharine way this telegraphic summary might lead you to expect. In the meantime, Jasmine stumbles through a series of suburban job-hunting moments, culminating in one of those menial jobs a lucky person finds every now and then that utterly transforms them.

That’s the plot, but this novel isn’t really as much about plot as it is character, primarily that of Jasmine’s father. Jasmine’s relationship with her difficult father is the central point of the novel. Early on, she remarks that despite having known him all her life, “If I had to stand up at his funeral one day and tell the world about his desires and hopes and who he was as a person, I’d stand there mute.” In the novel’s first pages Jasmine lists the seven big things she knows about her father—his lifelong aversion to broccoli; his habit of calling his parents in Iran every other Sunday; the fact that he used to beat their dogs with a shovel; his having pushed a young cousin off a wall in Iran, badly injuring her, and a few others as well distributed along the spectrum from banal to vile. As the chapters unfold, Jasmine examines each of those seven known things in some detail. Eslami deftly structures the narrative around each of these channel markers.

Eslami’s portrayal of Dr. Fahroodhi is frank, and there is much to dislike in the man. His vulnerabilities, explored as the book unfolds, may make the reader cringe on his behalf, but they do little to soften our impression of him; they mainly help reveal what broke him. Jasmine’s relationship with her father is one of those that might seem inexplicable to an outsider, a bond that apparently persists out of duty alone, with neither party gaining much. At that, it’s like a lot of father-daughter relationships. There is tenderness there, but it’s deeply masked: the unrequited love of a daughter for a man who observed his children “from a safe distance like a potentially flammable lab experiment,” the arguable love of a man for his incomprehensibly un-Persian daughter that mainly manifests as frustration and anger. That anger and frustration, felt on both sides, never comes to a head. Maybe it’s American of me, but I found myself wishing for a more open confrontation between the two.

All that notwithstanding, Eslami has not created a loveless father. Jasmine sees his love for her mother plainly and from a bit of a remove, as though it’s a specimen described in one of the natural history volumes she checks out of the small local library. One of the things I liked best in Bone Worship is Eslami's use of images, memories, passing conversations, and other bits of detail to represent Jasmine’s exploration of her relationship with her family and herself. The whole hastegar plot itself is a fair symbol for the involuntary relationship Jasmine has with her family—as we each have with our families. Eslami weaves these images into her prose quite deftly, and in ways that made me frankly envious of her sight. This is a hell of a fine novel, especially for a debut.

Review by Chris Clarke

Cross-posted at Coyote Crossing

The Solitude of Prime Numbers

By Paolo Giordano
Penguin

My best friend often teasingly tells me that the books I recommend to her are all too depressing and sad. I always counter that I recommend books that make me laugh. Now, that either means that I have a sick sense of humor, or it simply illustrates that the stories I most enjoy reading combine painful topics and awkward characters with humor, sarcasm, and witty writing.

Paolo Giordano’s The Solitude of Prime Numbers is exactly such a book. Giordano’s debut novel is the story of Alice and Mattia, two awkward and painfully lonely teenagers. Alice is marked by a childhood skiing accident that leaves her limping and deeply insecure about her body. In those cruel teenage years, she develops an eating disorder in an attempt to regain some control over her body. Mattia is haunted by suffocating guilt after the disappearance of his twin sister when he was nine years old. Alice and Mattia connect over their pain, their awkwardness, and their acute sense that they don’t fit in. But their bond is fragile, subtle, and built on a silent agreement that neither reveal the source of their pain to the other. Even in their connection, they remain isolated and lonely, never fully able to overcome what keeps them emotionally locked into their own worlds.

Eventually, their lives go in different directions and they separate, without ever openly communicating what they feel for each other. But despite being thousands of miles apart, neither Alice nor Mattia is willing or able to let go of their unusual bond. Reunited by a chance encounter, they are faced with a decision: to truly let the other in or return to a life without the other.

Giordano masterfully paints a world full of pain, loneliness, and love. While the humor in The Solitude of Prime Numbers is very subtle, it is there, in the background. It makes the tragedies bearable, the loneliness less hopeless. So yes, this novel is sad and depressing. But it is also incredibly powerful, and it will make you chuckle softly from time to time as you follow Alice and Mattia in their struggle to survive their childhood experiences.

Review by Annette Przygoda

The Love Ceiling

By Jean Davies Okimoto
Endicott & Hugh Books

As I started to write the review for this book, I realized that this is one of two books I have recently read about artists, more specifically painters—The Danish Girl being the other book that centered on artists/painters. I found the story of The Love Ceiling intriguing because the protagonist is a sixty-four-year-old wife, mother, and daughter of a famous artist father and long suffering Japanese-American mother who has recently passed away from cancer. Like many women of the so-called sandwich generation, Anne Kuroda Duppstadt has finally given herself permission to pursue her passion—that of becoming a painter—when she finds herself once again tending to the needs of her family: her thirty-two-year-old daughter moves home after discovering that her partner, Richard, has been cheating on her with a colleague at the hospital where he’s a resident, and Anne’s husband is not handling his impending retirement well and struggles with bouts of depression. This leads her to reach the conclusion at a certain point in the novel that “there is a glass ceiling for women... and it’s made out of the people we love.” Amidst all of this, Anne finally finds the courage to stand up to her domineering father, a man who demands center stage at all times and told her many years ago that she didn’t have what it takes to be a real artist.

I’m not sure why this is the case, but I rarely have the opportunity to read a book that features a sixty-four-year-old protagonist. Being a forty-something single woman, I wasn’t sure I would relate to this character, but I found myself immediately drawn into her feistiness, sense of humor, and honesty that is revealed as the reader progresses through the novel. I also enjoyed the author’s description of the natural beauty of the surroundings through the eyes of an artist (Anne is a gifted landscape artist). Painting with words came to my mind as I was reading this book.

I also had to admit to myself that I made the mistake of assuming that the internal life of a sixty-four-year-old wouldn’t be as interesting a read as that of a younger person, but that was definitely not the case. I found myself inspired by Anne’s character as well as that of an older female artist she meets at an artists’ workshop that she enrolls in to reclaim her dream of being an artist. In that sense, reading this book was also an educational experience for me because it challenged my assumptions about what it is to be an older woman in our society—that no matter how old you are, you can still be a vibrant, active participant in life.

My only criticism of the book is that one scene involving dialogue between Anne’s daughter and a friend in a coffee shop stood out as somewhat superfluous and unnecessary to the story line. Other than that, I found The Love Ceiling to be an excellent read. The book made me realize that sometimes it may take a lifetime to confront the demons of our past, but if life is a journey, it’s not how long it takes you to reach these epiphanies, but what you learn along with way.

Review by Gita Tewari

Dreams in Prussian Blue

By Paritosh Uttam
Penguin India

For a long time, it seemed to me as if all Indian writers in English wrote “serious” things—complicated stories, language that needed some getting through, “big” themes, weighty tomes. And then came Chetan Bhagat and the many followers in his footsteps, who unleashed upon us a spate of poorly-written novels, mostly to do with engineering institutes and adolescent angst. It seemed as if one could either have five-star hotel caviar or roadside vada pav; if you weren’t in the mood for the first and couldn’t stomach the second, poor you!

Luckily, times are changing. In the last couple of years, Indian writers in English are attempting every possible genre, including murder mysteries and graphic novels. There is a growing market for well-written, yet easy-to-read fiction, which is probably why Penguin has brought out a new series, Metro Reads, dubbing them “fun, feisty, fast reads.”

One of this series, Paritosh Uttam’s Dreams in Prussian Blue, would probably not qualify for the "fun" bit, given its somewhat serious story, but it fulfills the rest of the criteria. Dreams in Prussian Blue is the unconventional love story of art college dropouts, Naina and Michael. The novel sticks to a small group of characters and does that well—while Michael is the anti-hero, Uttam takes the reader to the darkness behind seemingly "nice" and bland characters as well.

The bonus is that while the story is novel and the characters real, the language is simple enough for the average reader. A live-in relationship, a selfish artist, a naive young woman who realizes that love and fresh air may not be enough, the Indian art world, nosy neighbours and traditional parents who can no longer hold on to their children—the plot moves forward quickly, and kept me engrossed wanting to know what happens (and plenty does!). The dialogue works too, with the lingo of the twenty-something crowd captured well.

It so happened that the last few weeks, I’ve been snowed under work and reluctant to take on anything too complicated. Dreams in Prussian Blue fits perfectly into that sort of mood—when all you want is a good story.

Review by Aparna V. Singh

Cross-posted at Apu's World

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

By Maryse Condé
University of Virginia Press

This fascinating novel, which won France's Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme, offers readers a vivid re-imagining of the life of a historical figure mentioned only briefly in the transcripts of the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials: a slave woman of Caribbean origins, accused of practicing voodoo. Angela Davis, in her foreword to the current edition, asserts the importance of “the retelling of a history that is as much mine as it is hers,” a story of great significance to Black women who are “Tituba's cultural kin.” The first person narrative gives Tituba an opportunity to recount her life as she sees it, to overcome the silence imposed on her by official histories of the period. Maryse Condé, herself born in Guadeloupe, begins by evoking the beauties and horrors of the West Indies—of Barbados in particular—where Tituba is born to an Ashanti woman “as lithe and purple as the sugarcane flower,” who had been raped by a British sailor. Little Tituba flourishes at first in her island home, but her mother comes into conflict with their master and is hanged for striking a white man. At the age of seven, Tituba is taken in by old Mama Yaya and raised in the traditional healing ways inherited from African ancestors. The growing girl learns to respect everything in nature, to make the proper prayers and sacrifices, to devise “potions whose powers I strengthened with incantations,” and to communicate with the spirits, including her deceased mother.

The idyll in the wilderness ends abruptly when the adolescent Tituba falls in love with a merry rascal, a slave named John Indian. She soon moves to the capital, Bridgetown to be with him. John Indian jokingly calls her a witch, because of her special magical gifts, but others suspect her of commerce with the devil even though, as she protests, “Before setting foot inside this house I didn't know who Satan was!” In an interview published in the afterword to the present edition, Maryse Condé describes Tituba as “doing only good to her community” through her relations with “the invisible forces,” and therefore not a witch in the bad connotations of the term, but the bigoted people with whom she comes in contact—especially after she is sold along with John Indian to a Puritan minister, Samuel Parris—do not see her in a positive light.

One of the themes of the book is the unlikely (and, unfortunately, often temporary) alliances that can form between persons divided by race, class, or religion. When Parris moves with his household to Boston, a strong friendship develops between Tituba and Elizabeth Parris, the minister's wife, as well as with her child Betsey, It is one of the ironies of the novel that Tituba's efforts to amuse and aid the girls in her charge at Salem Village arouse the villagers' fears and turn them against her. The Caribbean folktales she tells about sorcerers and vampires titillate everyone and feed their fears of damnation and demonic possession. When Betsey tells her cousin Abigail about the secret magic rites Tituba has used to protect the frail little girl, the situation gets out of control. Condé locates the ultimate source of the hysteria that sweeps through the village as a combination of the repression of healthy sensual pleasures along with the accumulation of small-town jealousies and resentments among the populace, together with unacknowledged guilt at the mistreatment of Blacks and American Indians by the white settlers. The village girls accuse many local figures of magically tormenting them.

Arrested and interrogated in 1692, Tituba at first protests her innocence: she has done no wrong, has not hurt any of the afflicted children. Her husband John Indian advises her to play along with her accusers, to tell them what they want to hear. He even pretends to be possessed, himself. In a controversial sequence criticized by many reviewers, the novel's heroine encounters a character called Hester in prison, clearly based on the wholly fictional heroine of The Scarlet Letter. Certain historians have condemned this intrusion of Romantic literature into a historical novel, yet Condé in her interview defends it on two different grounds: a) that her work “is the opposite of a historical novel,” that her Tituba is an invented “female hero, ... a mock-epic character,” and b) that as a novelist, she felt “there was a link between Tituba and Nathaniel Hawthorne,” persons inhabiting the same region at times not too far apart for comparison. The conversation between the two prisoners gives Condé a chance to explore the social constraints on women and the difficult relations between men and women. Ann Armstrong Scarboro's afterword asserts that here Condé “parodies modern feminist discourse,” but it seems to me that Condé gets to play both sides against the middle in these passages by intermixing humorous and serious notes and leaving it up to the reader to decide how to interpret them.

While Tituba's testimony at trial is quoted from actual transcripts, the additional context Condé provides suggests that the accused woman is merely mouthing words that others are saying, going along with other people's superstitions. As a confessed witch she is sentenced to jail but escapes the death penalty. Thus she survives, while many of the people condemned for witchcraft are executed. The historical note to this edition of the novel states that in 1693 the slave Tituba was sold to pay her prison fees and the price of her chains. It is unclear what happened thereafter to the historical woman, but Condé chooses to have her Tituba purchased by Benjamin Cohen d'Azevedo, a Portuguese Jewish merchant whose wife had died. Benjamin and Tituba slowly become friends and eventually lovers. After a terrible house fire set by Puritan persecutors in which Benjamin's children are killed, he frees her and buys a ship passage back to Barbados for her. There she becomes involved with a group of maroons—wild Blacks who seem to be working towards freedom for the plantation slaves—but even there she finds betrayal and a revolt that fails. She is finally hanged by the British authorities. The epilogue finds the spirit of Tituba still active in the island, heroine of a popular song going about encouraging the slaves to fight for liberty.

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem is a work I highly recommend to people interested in African-American and Caribbean literature, colonialism and post-colonialism, post-modernism and feminism, as well as to any reader interested in a colorful adventure tale. The additional scholarly materials provided in this edition make this book helpful even to readers familiar with the original French text.

Review by Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring

Elegies for the Brokenhearted

By Christie Hodgen
W.W. Norton

Elegies for the Brokenhearted is a book about nobodies. The narrator, Mary Murphy, is a silent observer to the destructive forces around her that ultimately shape the outcome of her life. As invisible as her ubiquitous name, Mary is a shy—and at times optionally mute—child and young adult who finds very little to care for. We first meet Mary as a young girl trying desperately to gain the (positive) attention of her mother and uncle. As the reader learns more of these relationships, often one-sided with a young, vulnerable, Mary left aching for more, we understand why her emotions calcify at such a young age.

As silent as she may be to the other people in her life, as a narrator she is bitingly, viscerally descriptive, and engaging, and I found myself completely immersed in her world; always fighting for her despite her many shortcomings. The prose in this novel is engrossing and her world became very real to me, despite the overwhelmingly bleak, disappointing theme.

If the majority of the book was engrossing, the end left much to be desired. Mary, who had never found inspiration in anything—music, reading, working, even eating and talking—suddenly became a wonderful teacher of underprivileged youth and an effortless mother. The most destructive and formative relationships in her life, with her mother and sister, are terminated without closure, and she seems to heal from them effortlessly right in time for the last pages of the book. The reader had already come to accept Mary despite some loose ends; it would have been nice to see a more realistic, albeit less pretty, ending to the story.

This is not the cheeriest book you will read this summer, but the protagonist is a nobody that everybody will root for.

Review by Colleen Hodgetts

Everything Matters!

By Ron Currie, Jr.
Viking

Someone should count how many coming-of-age novels have ever been written that focus on white, male characters. To me, it seems like every time I browse around in a bookstore and skim through the back covers of books in the “New & Hot Fiction” section, the onslaught of these story set-ups just doesn’t end. I realize that some topics never get boring, like love, betrayal, or war. But in a seemingly endless sea of new and existing stories about the teenage and early adult years of white men, it must be incredibly hard to create a story that is exciting and different.

This is where Everything Matters! comes in. Or so I thought. Based on descriptions and reviews elsewhere, I decided to override my own personal annoyance with characters like Holden Caulfield, Pip, or Adrian Healey. Hailed as a small miracle and a delightful read by reviewers at NPR or the New York Times, Everything Matters! is the story of Junior Thibodeau who is born with the knowledge that thirty-six years into his life, an asteroid will destroy the earth and all human life. Written in a quirky, rather unpredictable sequence of countdowns and changing narrative perspectives, the book follows Junior’s life from early moments in his mother’s uterus to the final moment. Junior hears a voice that tells him exactly what will happen, not just in terms of the earth’s demise, but also throughout his life. That would be unusual enough, but Junior is also portrayed as a genius who seems to be able to accomplish anything, including discovering the cure for cancer in only two weeks, if he sets his mind to it. Yet, despite these super-human abilities and an all-encompassing knowledge of the future, Junior must grapple with the fact that no matter what he manages to achieve, the world will still be destroyed.

This is what makes, or should make, Everything Matters! different than other coming-of-age stories. The plot allows for unique opportunities to explore existential questions, to play with the irony of creating a character that is capable of ending suffering from diseases, poverty or global hunger in a situation where none of that really matters. Or does it? And this is where the book falls short. Of 302 pages, only the last thirty or so actually dive into the possibilities that are set up by the story. It is here that Currie tackles, and somewhat heavy-handedly, the “why bother making an effort in life if you know it’s all going to end soon anyway?” questions. The rest of the novel very much gets lost in the sea of other coming-of-age novels. We hear too much about how Junior screws up with the love of his life, how as a result, he spends years getting drunk in cheap, dirty bars and how he still manages to be the hero for his family (and briefly also for all mankind). It’s all too familiar and too much.

Technically, the book is very unique. The narration switches back and forth between the omniscient, all-knowing narrator (the voice that Junior hears) and the various characters in the novel. The book starts with a countdown, but then abandons the countdown for large parts of the book, only to pick it up again toward the end. For someone interested in playing with structure and narration, it might be well worth the read just to see what Currie manages to come up with. However, I often felt that Currie was a bit too much into playing with technique at the expense of the story itself. There were numerous times in the book where I thought that often very bizarre sub-plots were inserted only to incorporate another writer-technicality, with little or no purpose for the content of the story. Again, it was all a little much.

All in all, I can’t say that Everything Matters! did away with my annoyance with yet another supposedly witty but deep story about some white dude in his teens and early adulthood. There is a lot of potential in the set-up to make this a different and exciting read, if Currie lost some of the showing-off of technique and the all too common features of the development of his protagonist. A few stronger female characters would be nice, too. As it stands, Everything Matters! over-promised and under-delivered for me, but I would love to see someone pick up on where the last thirty pages of the novel left off.

Review by Annette Przygoda

The Pregnant Widow

By Martin Amis
Knopf

I’m so upset that I’m not at Hay Festival right now. Because the lineup looks phenomenal. Not only is Stephen Fry doing a talk, but Zadie Smith and Martin Amis are both on the lineup. Now, Smith is awesome for all sorts of reasons, and, coincidentally, I actually read White Teeth at Hay Festival last year. But this year I’d be more interested in seeing Amis—which is surprising given that he is a grumpy old man with a penchant for misogyny. Or so the legend goes. He, in fact, denies this claim, and tells us that his book, The Pregnant Widow, is "very feminist"—although he admits it will get him in trouble.

Indeed, it has not been received particularly well from the lovely group of people at BBC 2's The Review Show. Supposedly about the feminist revolution and the destruction that it wreaked on the people who were affected by sexual liberation, I found (as, it seems, did Germaine Greer) that there was an awful lot of focus on body parts. Scheherazade has big tits. Gloria has a big arse. And Keith’s girlfriend Lily has neither. That seems to be all that matters for a lot of the book. Keith’s main mission is to sleep with as many of the girls as possible, and then (*spoiler alert*) he marries all of them in succession.

The characterisation of the female characters is weak. Scheherazade is a ridiculous appropriation of the "poor little rich girl" stereotype, lifted from a piece of chick lit where marriage is the only goal. (I am aware that comment is derogatory to chick lit and, as I am reading a book about that very subject at the moment, I thus present this long back-covering disclaimer.) Scheherazade is the only woman who ends up happy, because she gets married and has kids, ignoring the sexual liberation movement. Woop. Well done, girl.

Violet, however, Keith’s free-spirited sister, gets destroyed. Killed off because she has too much sex. She is apparently based on Amis’ own sister, Sally, whom he is convinced was killed by her promiscuity, or some other such ridiculous reason. Maybe it had actually nothing to do with feminism, and neither does the demise of Violet, who appears to have mental health issues and is dire need of help. That is why she dies—not because feminists allowed women their sexual agency and made it less (not completely) shameful to have sex as a woman.

Keith is an overly whiny character. He needs to get some courage and just deal with his issues. He always seems to want to blame someone else for his own failings in life—and it’s irritating. He is not a lovable character and, quite honestly, I’m not rooting for him for most of the novel. Or any of it, actually.

Despite all this, and despite Amis’ desire to elevate his own (or Keith’s own, although it’s supposed to be semi-autobiographical) struggle to a higher level by associating it with 1970s feminism, I really enjoyed The Pregnant Widow. The personal is not always political, which I think Amis might need to think about before he tries this sort of thing again, and despite it making me angry every now and again (particularly the pretentiousness of Keith’s character), I liked it.

The Pregnant Widow is evocative, well-written, and clever, and the story is enjoyable. (Although I do feel it tapers out a bit when we get into serious mid-life crisis territory.) It’s not the usual "zOMG look how postmodern I am" offering from Amis, and I really liked it. Maybe even loved it.

Review by Amy Elizabeth Richards

Half Life

By Roopa Farooki
St. Martin's Press

Love stories aren’t really my thing, but Roopa Farooki’s newest novel, Half Life, shows many shades of love in a way that warms the heart, wets the eye, and expands the mind. The book opens with Aruna Ahmed Jones’ seemingly crazy and impulsive decision to leave her year-old marriage. She does this quite literally by stopping mid-breakfast, throwing on a light jacket, and making her way through the Tube to London’s Heathrow International Airport where she hops the next plane to her hometown of Kuala Lumpur, and back into the arms of lifelong friend and ex-lover Jazz Ahsan. We soon learn that two years ago Aruna left Jazz in a similarly rushed and unexplained exit, and the story progresses by attempting to resolve the characters’ (and reader’s) unanswered questions about her ostensibly hasty retreats.

To go into any depth about the somewhat unsettling plot would be to reveal too much; indeed, I recommend the reader skip even the publisher’s description on the front cover flap and dive headfirst into chapter one. The core of this story revolves around the destructive nature of family secrets and the reparative qualities of truth. Half Life is full of subtle yet astute observations about the personal and social functions of one’s identity as a person of a particular class, gender, nationality, and mental health status—and exemplifies how all are historically and geographically situated. Without being too obtuse or heavy-handed, the story is, ultimately, about finding one’s authentic self while avoiding being a detriment to those one cares for deeply.

Language makes the ordinary extraordinary, and Farooki’s gift is in the ease with which she perfectly captures the complexity of a moment with a casual, pithy description. Literary hat tips are littered throughout with tender references to such masterful figures as the Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore, British poet Wilfred Owen, and Jacobean dramatist John Ford—all of whose influences can be readily felt while turning the book’s pages. Farooki is obviously a thoughtful writer, and the story is executed with well-planned precision. Half Life is penned in a visceral style similar to that of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies or Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows. Farooki’s witty wordplay constructs a melancholy emotionality that mirrors the interplay between the main characters. The ubiquitous sense of suspense maintains reader’s interest even after the elements of surprise are effortlessly divulged.

Half Life is a substantative beach read that is engaging as it is accessible. But be sure to slather on the sunscreen or find a cozy spot in the shade before cracking the spine. You might just find you’re unable to put this book down once you pick it up.

Review by Mandy Van Deven

Cross-posted at VenusZine

Ilustrado

By Miguel Syjuco
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado is the novel made for re-reading. There are continual twists and turns and questions about the nature of fiction writing that immediately attune one to the constructed nature of the textual landscape. Indeed, Ilustrado is a metafiction, as it involves a character by the name of Miguel, a writer living in New York who is researching the life of a Filipino expatriate writer named Crispin Salvador.

At the beginning of the novel, the readers discover that Crispin has died under mysterious circumstances. Miguel, having been acquainted with and impressed by Salvador’s work and life, goes about trying to find out what might have happened to Salvador, especially as he embarks on writing Salvador’s life story. The novel is written with this main storyline, but scattered throughout are excerpts from Salvador’s many creative writings, both fictional and nonfictional in scope. There are also various interviews and blog excerpts that continually provide more context and more complexity to Crispin Salvador.

The other major narrative involves Miguel’s own life, one marked by the tragic and premature death of both his mother and father. Miguel and his many siblings are raised by his grandparents. Perhaps, not surprisingly, the novel takes us to the Philippines where Miguel is both haunted by the tensions that have disintegrated his family and looks to discovering more about his esteemed Crispin Salvador.

The title of Miguel’s novel, comes from the Filipino elite that traveled to Europe in the late nineteenth century in order to receive an education. In this regard, the “enlightened ones” speaks to the complicated ways in which the colonial subject could continue to be indoctrinated by the cultural capital devised out of the imperial enterprise. Nevertheless, the education that the ilustrados received also helped foment the revolutionary ideals espoused by those such as Jose Rizal. In this way, the novel is distinctly postcolonial in character inasmuch as it might be called Asian American.

Following Crispin’s life through the eyes of Miguel’s work and by other creative excerpts, the novel does track an impressive array of historical changes that have typified the Philippines in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Crispin, having been raised in affluence, must come to terms with his class background and finds himself using writing as a venue to share his political sentiments. The hope for the venue of writing as a direct instigator of political activism is a vexed issue throughout the novel and we can see that Syjuco is tarrying with the complex ways in which representation, referent, and social protest collide. Miguel, too, comes from a clearly privileged background and all throughout the novel we see the ways in which class stratification details the Manila landscape that becomes a sort of “third” character.

Like the recently reviewed, A Thread of Sky, Syjuco excels at painting a picture of modern metropolitan Manila in all of its intricacies and these urbanscapes become the terrain upon which power and difference can be situated. As the plot moves directly into the homes and lives of individual characters, we see, for instance, the way in which the domestic workers are subordinated and often times flagrantly abused. In the clubscapes, individuals worry about the latest fashions and where to score a round of drugs. The profligacy of the Manila elite is meant to destabilize any deterministic trajectory of the country’s progressivism. In addition, the political ruling class is also portrayed as corrupt and ineffectual. In this general space of guarded pessimism, the novel begins to turn inward with a major shift in the conclusion that queries the entire nature of the narrative trajectory itself. It begs the question about the construction of the modern Filipino/American subject, and he or she has come to exist at hazy boundary between fantasy and reality.

Ilustrado is a consummately entertaining book, one that will have you immediately re-reading, spending more time on the many different threads that hold the book together.

Review by Stephen Hong Sohn

Cross-posted at Asian American Literature Fans

A Thread of Sky

By Deanna Fei
Penguin Press

Six Chinese American female characters form the main narrative perspectives of Deanna Fei’s ambitious first novel, A Thread of Sky. There is family matriarch Lin Yulan, once a revolutionary for the nationalist party in China, and her daughters Irene and Susan. Irene is a bereaved widow looking to herself reconnect with her three daughters: Nora, a finance and marketing success; Kay, the one most connected to her Chinese ethnic roots; and Sophie, the youngest who struggles with an eating disorder and was just accepted to Stanford University. Irene’s grand plan to unite the family is to plan a trip to China, a venture in which only women will be invited.

Lin Yulan’s revolutionary past is one that sets the tone for the generations that follow, as she raises both Irene and Susan to be independent women who strive for careers of their own. When Irene’s career as a scientist begins to find a renaissance after the birth of her first two children, she discovers she is pregnant again. Irene’s mother wants her to abort the child, but Irene does not, and yet, despite Irene’s own commitment to raising a family, the values instilled in her by her mother regarding the importance of self-sustainment are also ones she hands down to her daughters.

There are many complications on the trip, and all revolve around romance and relationships (perhaps with the exception of Sophie). Nora’s crumbling relationship with her Caucasian WASP-y husband leaves her in an escapist mindset when she assents to go on the tour. Having arranged a meeting with her grandfather while she was in China previously, Kay possesses her own agenda about the impending trip. (Lin Yulan and her husband, Kay’s grandfather, parted on bad terms when she left for the United States, making Kay’s overtures both risky and somewhat sentimental.) Sophie would rather stay at home preparing for her freshman year and developing a relationship with her African American boyfriend, Brandon. She also finds herself dealing with an eating disorder that arises not long after her father dies. Susan, a poet, although seemingly happily married to Winston, still finds herself thinking about an ill-conceived affair with a former creative writing student named Ernesto.

At one point early on in the novel, The Joy Luck Club is referenced. It is an apt moment that recalls the self-consciousness of many Asian American writers publishing today. In that novel, Jing-mei returns to China, sets foot on what is believed to be a kind of homeland, and finds some sort of resolution within the last handful of pages. This kind of return journey is not the one that Fei has planned. Indeed, the tour of China is just the beginning of a narrative about the complications of intergenerational relationships between these Chinese American women. Fei lets her characters find footing by exposing their flaws and judiciously characterizing their various goals and motivations. The novel finds its surest stride within character construction.

There is, of course, one other major “character,” which is the way Fei configures China. The Chinese American women struggle to find clear and transparent attachments to nation and place. China is not a landscape that yields easily to them, but Fei is clear to mark these women off differently than other tourists and mobile elites. Indeed, there is a large discourse related to China’s modernization that is being interrogated any time the six women find themselves in bazaars or markets, where global capitalism is ambivalently represented.

There is a delicate balancing act in the characters' desire to root out problematic inequities arising from China’s modernization while simultaneously discovering that such problematics are difficult and thorny to address. The most compelling parts of the novel are rooted here, especially when Kay attempts to constitute a mode of transnational feminism that is thwarted at almost every turn by the way upward mobility becomes one of the ways by which China’s future is brokered. It is clear that Fei’s novel does not broker to presenting China as an exotic, unchanging landscape that can be claimed by the credit card. Rather, it is complex and shifting, a place that is constantly being razed and rebuilt, preserved in some locations, but disintegrating in others.

A Thread of Sky does not conclude with easy answers and, instead, leaves many open questions. In this suspended state of expectance, the novel resolutely moves outside of sentimentalism and resides in a domestic drama that unfolds unceasingly and with admirable restraint. In this regard, A Thread of Sky manages to offer a visually stunning tableau of China’s evolution in the twenty-first century without shifting into the superficiality of a travelogue, letting the reader’s sense of an already complex geography change as her characters do too.

Review by Stephen Hong Sohn

Cross-posted at Asian American Literature Fans

The Danish Girl

By David Ebershoff
Penguin Books

The Danish Girl is like a multilayered Flemish painting or tapestry. On the surface, it’s the story of the marriage of two painters, Clara and Einar. However, Einar Wegener was the first male to undergo successful gender affirming surgery. And The Danish Girl is also the story of a search for one’s true identity, and how one navigates that struggle within the boundaries of a relationship.

The novel opens in Copenhagen in the 1920s and the author has painted a rich landscape of the country and culture at the time, which I found almost as interesting as the storyline. We meet Clara and Einar after they have settled into a domestic routine, of sorts: two painters living in Copenhagen trying to make a living through their art. Known for his landscapes, Einar is the more acclaimed and successful of the two, while Clara finds herself painting portraits of well-known businessmen and society types. Clara is a young, willful, and wealthy California heiress who fell in love with Einar while enrolled in art classes at the Royal Academy, where he is a teacher. Despite being six years her senior, Einer was shy and awkward, and Clara pursued him somewhat relentlessly.

As the novel progresses, we discover that Einar has been encouraged by Clara to occasionally dress in women’s clothes when her female subjects are delayed or unable to make their sitting appointments. Einar is a slender, pretty man who is described as "beautiful" in the novel. Clara senses that Einar has a love of all things feminine, and starts to encourage him to dress as a woman, who they start introducing as Einar's distant cousin Lili to their friends. At first, this is a secret game between the pair, but as Einar needs to dress as Lili more and more, the dynamic in the marriage changes, making Clara increasingly uncomfortable. Clara believes that part of loving someone is doing whatever you can do to make them happy, and although she is ambivalent about Einar’s need to dress as Lili, her paintings of Lili start to garner her praise and acclaim in the art world.

The subject matter of The Danish Girl could have been treated as a spectacle, or voyeuristic experience, but it is treated sensitively by the author. The author sensitively renders Einar’s sometimes painful experiences with his changing identity, and we experience the distinct worlds of these two separate individuals. I was surprised to discover that this novel was first published in 2000. The story is especially topical given that transgender experiences are now being discussed on shows like Oprah, which signifies that the issue has become mainstream, or at least an acknowledged part of our cultural dialogue.

The Danish Girl is being made into a movie that is scheduled for release in the United States in 2011. Nicole Kidman will star as Lili. If reading is supposed to take you on a journey of the mind and expand your understanding of the world, The Danish Girl is certainly deserving of high praise.

Review by Gita Tewari

Letter to My Daughter

By George Bishop
Random House

I admit that I am influenced by book titles in my choice of books to read. In that sense, Letter to My Daughter was somewhat off putting for me. I was expecting a somewhat predictable story of a mother writing a letter to her daughter. Fortunately, I overcame my reticence, and upon reading the first couple of paragraphs I found myself immersed in a riveting story.

The novel begins in present day Baton Rouge, Louisiana; a mother (Laura) has started writing a letter to her daughter Elizabeth to alleviate her anxiety and worry. Her teenage daughter has just left the house after yet another argument with her mother In her letter, Laura has decided to tell her daughter about her own troubled adolescent years and share secrets about her past she had previously been unable to confide.

As we read Laura's letter, we travel back in time to the late '60s. Laura’s parents are conservative Southern Baptists who don’t approve of her relationship with Tim, a Cajun boy from the other side of town. Laura continues to see Tim against her parents wishes until one fateful day when Laura’s life is changed irrevocably. At the risk of giving too much of the plot away, the novel touches on themes of prejudice, young love and sexuality, the Vietnam War, mother-daughter relationships, and the challenges of being both a teenager and a parent in an increasingly complex world.

You don’t have to be a parent or a teenager to relate to this story. Once I started reading Letter to My Daughter, I found it difficult to put it down and ended up reading it in just two sittings. Don’t be put off by the title of this book as I was; the author has created an unforgettable story that will stay with you for days after you turn the last page.

Review by Gita Tewari