Skeletons at the Feast

I know it seems baffling to be writing book reviews on Christmas Eve. But, the presents are wrapped, the house is relatively clean, the laundry is spinning, the boys are playing and I need to get these books out of my head so that I can relax. I do enjoy writing them, but when I get backlogged, I can feel a little overwhelmed by all the characters and plots in my head.

Skeletons at the Feast took me to a dark place - the Holocaust. If there weren't so many great books written about this black mark of the world's history, I would ban myself from reading any books on this topic in the future. I hate that such a horrific occurrence is repeatedly used as bait for novelists.

Bohjalian is a good author, though, and does a good job developing his characters, giving them interesting conflict, all the while threading bits of real history into his story that he obtained through diligent research. I'll give him credit for all of the above.

However, part of me felt like Bohjalian decided this was going to be his one and only time to write about the Holocaust so he was going to put it all in one book. The details he gives about the atrocities committed by the German soldiers, the Russian soldiers and the desperate and destroyed left in their wake is so graphic, so skin-crawling brutal that it borders on gratuitous. Including as much as he does has the opposite effect from the one I imagine the author intended and his book almost becomes a WWII caricature. I'm not saying the things he describes didn't happen. No, he seems to have read enough journals and letters to give each horror story credibility, but to include them all -- in the same book, witnessed by the same characters in the space of about a year -- it made these disturbing acts of cruelty seem made-up. I feel it was a disservice to take someone's real life nightmare and diminish it by setting it alongside so many other nightmares so that they all seem somehow....less. Because that is what happens. The first description was like a punch in the stomach, the next a slap on the face and all the rest...swats on an already numb backside.

As much as I wanted to, I didn't dislike this book. Bojahlian creates a complicated story about the fallout from ignorance, naivety, and privilegefound among the rural aristocrats of Poland and Germany near the end of the war. Not forced to witness the daily disappearance of Jews and other minorities, the Emmerilich family was living in relative peace and prosperity, along with their polite relationships with the POWs helping out on their beet farm, until the ugly consequnces of their fuhrer's decisions found their way to the family's country manor, Kamenheim. Anna, The Emmerlich's teenage daughter, falls in love with Callum, a scottish POW, and convinces her parents to allow him to remain with their family instead of sending him back to the prison camps. As Callum and the Emmerlichs flee the approaching Russian troops, the blinders of this family's eyes are removed and they finally see first hand the destruction throughout their land. Along their west-bound journey, they meet and become dependent upon Uri, a young, vigilante Jew posing as a German soldier in order to survive. There is an additional, competely separate story involving a french, Jewish girl named Cecile who is trying to keep herself and her friend, Jeanne, alive while prisoners in a concentration camp that does eventually intersect with Uri and the Emmerlichs but not soon enough to be satisfying

There are plenty of lessons to learn within the pages of this book, but I can't say that it is one I recommend. The author tries to write too many stories at once-- a romance, a look at Nazi sympathizers, stereotypes the Polish people had of Russians, allied prisoners of war, a coming of age story, the gore and sadism of war, Jewish resistance, Jewish survival and an unnecessary epilogue, to make this novel truly great.

Pillars of the Earth

I hated this book. Let's just get that out of the way so there is no confusion later on.

Ken Follett describes a gloomy, dismal, nearly barbaric society whose citizens' greatest concerns seem to be their egos and their lust for power and control. He uses the building of the great European cathedrals as the impetus for his story; the magnificent structures were made possible through trickery, lies, greed, criminal acts and selfish ambition. Forget about the Glory of God...that's just history's cover story. But Follett's cathedral in Pillars of the Earth serves as much purpose as the hospital in the soap opera General Hospital. He focused much more on the personal drama, romance, and rivalry of his weak characters. This was historical fiction a la Daytime television.

The story didn't even feel historical. Follett tried. He mentioned eating with a knife almost as frequently as the tunics his characters wore (Setting it apart from modern day. We no longer wear tunics, you know). But everything felt too modern - their speech, their attitudes, even their relationships. I read the mammoth 1,000 page story quickly but I can just as easily get sucked into Guiding Light. The plots are interesting enough...just mind-numbing and unlikely. For example, the Alfred-Aliena-Jack love triangle had my interest but then the high drama of Aliena's secret pregnancy followed by her truly unbelievable delivery (during the same time the ceiling of the cathedral fell....underneath the stone rubble....really?) along side Jack's odyssey was just too much. And could someone please just get kill William Hamleigh before he rapes someone else? (They don't. The reader is required to experience one too many grotesque acts by an inhumane man who supposedly fears hell. Once was MORE than enough, Ken. We get it. He's baaaaaad).

Even if there is some historical truth to the background story - the difficulty in building a cathedral (oh yeah..remember that?), it is overshadowed by all the non-historical melodrama. I don't think Follett did that period of history any favors by making it all seem so salacious.

Here Be Dragons does a much better job of storytelling the tumultuous middle ages. Read it if you want to experience the pettiness of power. I'd even recommend Philippa Gregory's novels over this. It was about 900 pages too long.

Loving Frank

This book was brought to my attention several months ago but I didn't seriously consider reading it because I thought it was essentially a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, the famous architect. I have a serious handicap when it comes to reading non-fiction and if I'm going to read a biography of someone, I wanted to read about someone whose life's details I had some...nay....any interest in knowing. An architect, even a really, really famous one, didn't meet that criteria.

When it was selected as a book group selection, I waved my white flag and read it anyway. Say what you will about book groups, one thing I appreciate about the forum is that they tend to throw books in my path that I wouldn't otherwise read. When I end up actually enjoying the mandated book, I appreciate the selection even more.

Loving Frank is part factual biography, part fictional novel featuring the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney's as she fell in love with Frank Lloyd Wright. Mamah, a feminist, intellectual and suffragist, was married to safe, loyal but rather boring Edwin Cheney. The married couple were financially secure enough to keep a nanny, a housekeeper and eventually hire an up and coming architect to build one of his conceptually new "Prairie Houses". Financial and marital security did not bring contentment to Mamah, however, and when Wright intimately connects with her on an intellectual and emotional level during the building of her and her husband's home, a physical affair between the two quickly follows.

What makes this story compelling and great discussion fodder isn't Frank and Mamah's relationship or their affair, it's the constant negotiating and justification the author forces Mamah to debate with herself and with the world about the honesty and integrity of romantic and self love. For Mamah, a person's own happiness super ceded that of any one else's, including one's children, although she admitted several times how incongruous that belief felt at times. When she found literature written by radical thinker, Ellen Key, her belief that she should be with Frank at the expense of everything else, because she loved him, deepened. I am left wondering when, if ever, a selfish act is the BEST act. As much as the pair wished it to be so, they did not exist in a bubble and their relationship had real and lasting consequences to the families they abandoned.

If the moral debate is the actual gift of the book (and for me, it was), then the fancy wrapping and giant bow is the holy-cow-wow! drama and historically significant events that made up the life of Frank Lloyd Wright. This should be a very interesting discussion.

Away

So - the big news is I've found myself a bookgroup! I rank finding a bookgroup I enjoy right up there with finding an OB/GYN, hair stylist, pediatrician, dentist, and babysitter after a move. I'm simply not settled until I have a group with whom I can meet and discuss things.

I was told the group planned on discussing Away by Amy Bloom, so I hoped beyond hope that I could find it at the library instead of buying the unproven book. I did and I'm lucky I did.

This is NOT a book I enjoyed. Apparently, Amy Bloom is a successful short story author and Away is her first attempt at a novel. Unfortunately for us readers, Away, while a novel's size in length, does not contain a novel's size plot. It has lots of side stories and a sort of light at the end of the tunnel to get you to keep reading, but a journey is not a plot and I found myself weary of the main character, Lillian Leyb, and her journey to find her possibly alive daughter, Sophie.

More than that, I found Lillian's character, the one and only consistant character from beginning to end, to be underdeveloped. I knew the kinds of shoes she wore, but I was given very little information about her personality. Did she enjoy being a mother? Did she love her husband? Does she want to be an American? The author writes her as extremely motivated without detailing her motivation. It's frustrating.

Her story begins as she looks for work and opportunity as a newly landed immigrant in New York City during the 1920s. Destitute and alone after the murder of her family in Russia, there is a coldness and lack of feelings to her actions. She seems to believe and act upon the philosophy that a desired end justifies any means.

Again, the story flounders because Bloom never really tells us what end Lillian wants. For the first 100 pages, she seems to merely want security but not necessarily happiness. When she receives news of her daughter who is possibly alive and possibly living in Siberia, the story suddenly changes and her sole desire is her daughter. The story's dramatic change from an immigrant's survival guide to a not-without-my-daughter drama doesn't work. The stories aren't really necessary tied together and the novel unravels into a series of short stories - none of which are particularly enjoyable as they each describe Lillian among the morally bankrupt as she impossibly attempts to find her daughter.

The delays and harships along the way (and along the way I mean from New York to Siberia via Alaska) have an almost circus-like horror to them. Any one of the situations Bloom puts Lillian in, starting with the massacre she witnesses while still in Russia) would be enough to defeat the strongest of women - if not kill them. Add to the implausibility of Lillian's survival the lack of background development to even care that mother and daughter are reunited and Away becomes a very fragmented and unfulfilling story.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Guernsey is a small Island in the English Channel that was controlled for five years by German forces during World War II. After the war, a young female British author, Juliet Ashton, finds herself unwillingly on a book tour to promote her book, Izzy Bickerstaff Goes To War. She's tired of the war, tired of writing under a pseudonym and tired of trying to be funny and lighthearted about such a horrible topic. Unfortunately, her mind draws a blank when it comes to knowing what else to write about. All of this information is delightfully given through amusing letters to her editor, Sidney.

While on tour, she receives a letter written by Dawsey Adams, a native of Guernsey, who has stumbled across her name written in a book by Charles Lamb. Seeking more information on this author, Juliet and Dawsey begin a correspondence that soon involves a dozen or so members of what is known as the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

The letters include informations about the conditions during the War, zany character sketches that Island life seems to be best at producing and an emerging story that Juliet eventually realizes is her next book topic. To gather more information for her book, she decides to travel to Guernsey to meet these people she has come to know through letters face-to-face.

I have to include one fabulous quote. It will put a smile on the face of any blogger that has risked a meeting with a fellow blogger for the first time:

As the mail boat lurched into the harbor, I saw St. Peter Port rising up from the sea on terraces, with a church on the top like a cake decoration, and I realized that my heart was galloping. As much as I tried to persuade myself it was the thrill of the scenery, I knew better. All those people I've come to know and even love a little, waiting to see -- me. And I, without any paper to hide behind. Sidney, in these past two or three years, I have become better at writing than living -- and think what you do to my writing. On the page, I'm perfectly charming, but that's just a trick I learned. It has nothing to do with me. At least, that's what I was thinking as the mail boat came toward the pier. I had a cowardly impulse to throw my red cape overboard and pretend I was someone else.

In spite of it's long and confusing title, this is a book I happily recommend to everyone. It's chaming, uplifting, well written, funny, clean, historical, romantic and, best of all...a very easy read. I've read a few disparaging reviews that attack the book for being World War II fluff or not an accurate representation of what a female author in 1946 would sound like in letters. To them I say...fiddlesticks. If you want the nitty gritty of World War II or a proper British tone, have at a long list of other books already available.

If, however, you want to jump into small-town life on Guernsey, remember the thrill of letter writing, and enjoy a collaborative "na-na-na-na-na-na!" at resident busy-body Adelaide Addison - read this book! I have a happy hunch you won't be disappointed.

A Town Like Alice

A Town Like Alice reminds me so much of my favorite book, Mrs. Mike. Both catalog the difficulties and triumphs of living in remote areas. Both are historical. Both have a strong and engaging female protagonist who are in love with a man responsibly tied to a piece of land. Neither are fluffy Harlequins but make that pit in the bottom of your stomach churn with romance.

In short, I loved it. A Town Like Alice follows Jean Paget, a Scottish woman who was raised by her parents in Malay (now known as Malaysia), returns to work there as an adult and ultimately finds herself trapped there as a Prisoner of War when the Japanese invade the Island during World War II.

Her captivity is accurately described as horrible, with starvation and long marches from town to town killing many women and children. But, it also shows that unique ability of women to nurture, even in the most degrading situations. When she meets Joe Harman, an Australian ringger (cowboy) and fellow POW, he tells Jean about his home and work near Alice Springs, a bonza town in the heart of the Outback. The two extremely lonely and isolated characters become friends. Eventually, when Joe steals five chickens to feed the sick and hungry women and children, Jean is interrogated and punished until Joe confesses and is later crucified by a cruel Japanese leader.

The story's narration is directed by an elderly British attorney, Noel Strachan, who is put in charge of a trust Jean's uncle leaves her. Even with the narration in his control, most of the story is told through Jean sharing her memories to Noel. Eventually, I found Noel's involvement and third party perspective very satisfying, mostly because it allowed the author to cover a greater amount of time without seeming overly jumpy.

The book was written in 1950 and feels like it at times. The attitudes of segregation and thoughtless charactitures of minorities creates feelings of discomfort at times. It's not done with malice, and the story isn't about racial barriers at all, so I didn't find it offensive. If anything, it allows an unapologetic view that probably most white people had at the time - which is actually an interesting glimpse on its own.

I appreciated this book - for its less frequently told story of female prisoners of war and for its celebration of the human spirit.

The Birth House

I should have known better than to read this. One thing I am not is pro-home birth. I'm not anti- home birth, but the more I read about the "exquisite, spiritual, satisfying" birthing of their babies, the more turned off I am by the usually-not-said-but-rather-implied understanding that any other kind of birth is not.

I know it's not true. Birthing a child is exciting and scary and hard and wonderful and one of the most memorable things any woman will do in her lifetime. But, the variety in which we can, and choose, to do it is wide and, thankfully, available. Writing that glorifies one means over another annoys me.

With that being said, it was impossible for this book not to annoy me. With a protagonist that is an ever understanding, compassionate, holds-to-her guns midwife and the villain a heartless, thoughtless, passionless.....MAN, the story was too black and white to be good. Yes, it had other merits including its vivid Nova Scotia backdrop, the emerging gain of independent, feminine thought during and after WWI and a somewhat interesting love story, but the bias was clear even when the writing was not (which, with all of the journal entries and articles occurred frequently).

I think women who line up on the home-birth side of the debate will love this book. It champions their clear superiority. Unfortunately, it doesn't really champion the beauty of all birth, or the most important thing of all...the availability of options.

The Coffee Trader

I read this because my husband really enjoys David Liss's writing and suggested I might like it. I rarely read anything he does (because I am not interested in all the ins and outs of wars, how to be a spy or navy seal, or how differences in Teslas improve MRI imaging), but I thought this might be a great crossover book - give us something to talk about at the table.

This is a manly book. The narrator follows Miguel Lienzo, a Portuguese Jew living in Amsterdam during the 17th century, who had escaped the Inquisition and now trades future commodities on the Dutch stock exchange. Miguel has lost all his fortune in the sugar trade and is currently living in his brother's damp basement, but has recently been introduced by an independent and ambitious Dutch widow to a relatively unheard of commodity: coffee. However, the Ma'amad, a ruling council of Jews, forbids all Jews from meeting with the Dutch in public (only one of many, many outlandish rules), which forces Miguel to create an intricate web of deceipt to carry out his ultimate goal of cornering the market and creating a European coffee monopoly, an act which would ultimately would make him a very, very rich man.

Ethics questions abound throughout the book as Miguel, the Ma'amad, the Dutch and all of society manipulate the rules in order to accomplish their own personal goals. At what point of these manipulation does the line of morality get crossed?

My husband liked the book because it contains a thriller-like tempo in regards to trading futures. Yes, I did just include the word "thriller" in a sentence describing economics. Who would have thought?

Well...David Liss did, and it sort of works. He manages to write the desperation and anxiety exchange trading involves, and even manges to write about the complexities of such a market without being overly technical or vague. However, in the end, it was still a novel about economics...and that, apparently, is one more thing I'm not interested in reading about.

Here Be Dragons

I love to read other people's favorite books. Amy M. recommended this to me, although I don't think she described it as her favorite. Just a book she had read a long time ago that she remembered loving. Having never even heard of it before, I pulled out my super reading powers and gave it a whirl.

First, this is NOT an easy read. The edition I checked out contained more than 700 thin pages of small print. Second, it's historical fiction about a time in history I had no prior knowledge of - 13th century England and Wales. Lastly, there are many, many characters to keep track of, most with unusual names and many being interrelated.

All these difficulties aside, I really enjoyed this story. At its heart is the love story between Llewelyn, Prince of North Wales who later became known as Llewelyn the Great of Wales, and his bride, Joanna, the illegitimate daughter of England's King John. Its development and conflict anchors a story that is forced to span war after war after battle after skirmish after war. Really, these ancient leaders never stopped fighting.

The title, Here Be Dragons, describes a map making technique used long ago. When map makers had limited or no knowledge of certain areas, they wrote, "Here be dragons" on the area with drawings of the mythical creatures to describe this unknown danger.

Both the Welsh people and the Norman-french, who currently held the English crown (really, it's all very interesting) were suspicious of the other and held strong prejudices against any of its citizens. The marriage, which could have and should have brought about peace between the two nations, only put Joanna, who loved both her Norman-French/English father and eventually her charismatic Welsh husband, in the middle.

After I finished reading, I spent a good deal of time researching the accuracy of the facts presented in the book. Many, if not most, are true. Obviously, the fiction comes from the interplay between characters and description of feelings, which can't ever be wholly known, but I think the author did a great job of infusing historical figures with life. The struggles over choosing heirs and the family feuds that any transfer of power creates, were believable and likely.

Most importantly, when applying this history lesson to our current times, I realized human nature doesn't change much...even eight-hundred years later. The names of the countries may have changed but we still believe there are dragons over in the unknown. We still use power and ignorance to fuel our wars and pride and wounded egos to justify them.

Will the human race ever grow up? Time with continue to tell. In the meantime, I'm happy I read this smart, complex and excellent book.

The Kommandant's Girl

I mentioned when I wrote my review on The Book Thief, how dismayed I felt when realizing the story was set in WWII Germany. The market for fictional stories of the war, especially the persecution and massacre of the Jews, seems to have been saturated.

The Book Thief surprised me with its fresh and irreverent approach to story telling. The Kommandant's Girl, on the other hand, stuck to the game plan and told a very conservative and unimaginative story.

To be fair, the book is set in Poland, not Germany, and the story is based on a real life story the author discovered while doing her research in Poland.

Emma Bau, a newlywed whose husband has escaped to help the resistance movement, finds herself in the Jewish Ghetto living with her parents. During one night, she is awoken and smuggled out of the ghetto and set up to live as Anna Lipowski with her husband's non-Jewish aunt. At a dinner party one evening, Emma/Anna meets Kommandant Georg Richwalder, a high ranking Nazi party member, and his attraction to her leads to his hiring her to be his assistant. As his assistant, she is expected to and in fact, wants to, help the resistance by acting as a spy whenever she can. To Jenoff's credit, she attempts to give her characters depth by allowing Emma/Anna to become attracted and attached to the Kommandant, understandable considering the short length of her relationship with her husband, and considering the kind of man Kommandant Richwalder appeared to be: fair, hard working and heartbroken from his wife's earlier suicide. As their relationship progresses, she is ultimately asked to betray her marriage vows and use her relationship with the Kommandant to gain urgent information for the resistance.

The story is interesting and even well told (except for the end when the author tried to tie up too many loose strings for plot purposes), but that interesting and well told story has already been done. Many times. Unfortunately for Jenoff, whether this particular story is true or not doesn't make its telling any more consequential. In spite of its familiarity, I'd recommend Pam Jenoff's account to anyone who hasn't reached their own threshold of World War II Jewish fiction.

The Alchemist's Daughter

Very hard to get into, but worth the effort. The story is made difficult with lots of ancient scientific theory about alchemy and discussions about the various philosophies propagated in the 18th century about air and fire. That kind of discussion doesn't make for easy reading, but if you can manage to get through it, the underlying story about innocence, nature vs. nurture, death and redemption are all very interesting. Throw in a heart wrenching romance and I found that I quite liked it.

Joan Of Arc

First of all, how embarrassed am I that I didn't really know the story of Joan of Arc? I thought it was about a girl soldier that was burned at the stake because she dressed up like a man.

This story is so much more complicated than that. This is a story about faith, courage, revelation, miracles, pride, power, corruption, martyrdom and enduring to the end. This is a story that is so astonishing that most should be thoroughly schooled in its details. It is very inspiring. In short, Joan of Arc's story could easily be found in any set of scriptures.

I find it interesting that Mark Twain wrote this book. He, a man of little to no faith and disdain for those who practiced it, clearly loved and admired Joan. Twain's familiar wit and satirical prose are all but absent within these pages. Instead, he writes as a man named de Conte, the fictional page and scribe of Joan, thus allowing himself to write with his own adoring perspective, without having to actually be Mark Twain. He called this the "best of all his books" and no doubt felt that way after a result of twelve years of research. As there is plenty of historical data available about Joan's life, including the full transcript of her trial, I have little doubt that this is a very accurate representation of her life.

On one hand, I like his choice in narration. As Joan's friend and scribe, Twain's de Conte manages to allow the reader to witness Joan's life from his own memory, a memory that included first hand accounts of most of Joan's life. And although his biting wit is extremely toned down, little glimpses are seen here and there through the telling of personal side notes.

On the other hand, the narration allowed the book to frequently become overly sentimental. Louis de Conte oft wandered away from the main story line to regale a story of the Paladin, or La Hire or his attraction towards Catherine de Boucher. In addition, I lost track of how many paragraphs were lent to remind the reader, once again, about Joan's saintliness. I feel it was unnecessary and writing it, over and over again, gave the book a "dumbed down" feel (which really is quite silly because this is NOT an easy read - I should have been grateful for any dumbing down). I think the caliber of her person, as well as her righteousness, were made obvious by her very actions, by her charity and by her speech. To point it out so often was overdoing it and eventually wore down my good opinion. I have a hard time loving a book that bored me at times.

That being said, this is an incredible book about an even more incredible historical figure. I could write and write about how much I loved Joan and her goodness, about her persecution and how much her story reminded me of Joseph Smith's. There are striking similarities, down to the resigned knowledge of their own endings. But they knew what they knew, they knew God knew what they knew, and they could not deny it. With their knowledge, they accomplished great works and forever changed the course of history. Read for yourself and become smitten with the power of a seventeen year old girl who became commander in chief of all the armies in France...because God told her to do it.

Thank you, Amy. I am so much more enlightened because you sent this to me. I can walk around with confidence knowing all I now know about the life of Joan of Arc.

A Lantern In Her Hand

I need to get this book out of my head. I think it's partly to blame for this heavy blanket of melancholy I've been feeling since Friday.

Originally published in 1928, Beth Streeter Aldrich uses this novel to create a fantastic female character, Abbie Deal. Abbie's story begins in 1854, when she is eight years old and at the start of a three week journey, traveling with her family by wagon from Illinois to Iowa. The fact that I grew up listening to pioneer stories from this era made her voyage very vivid in my mind. I could see the sacks of flour falling out of the wagon and floating in the river and the oxen slowly pulling all the families' possessions along a bumpy buffalo trail. The story ends in 1926 with Abbie's death at the age of 80. The face of America changed dramatically between those years, and Abbie's life changed alongside it.

Part pioneer story, part pride of Nebraska lesson, part farming tutorial, part commentary about marriage - Aldrich ultimately uses Abbie Deal to explain the choices and sacrifices that faced a 19th century woman, or more specifically, a mother.

Perhaps Abbie Deal's selfless mothering is the source of my distress. I've always felt I've lacked in this arena and while I've tried really hard not to compare myself to my friends' and siblings' styles of mothering, I found myself forlorn with the realization that I was no Abbie Deal. Abbie was a natural mother. She postponed her dreams of becoming a singer and learning how to paint the prairie's sunset to follow her husband, Will, to Nebraska at the end of the Civil War.

Originally, she postponed these dreams for the sake of her husband, who needed to carve his own way in life away from his father. Later she postponed them because there was no money or opportunity and every ounce of her energy went into building their home and farm and caring for her young children. Later yet, she postponed them because her children grew and had dreams of their own that required any extra time or money she had saved. Finally, she abandoned them altogether because her talents had left her. Her voice had faded from non-use and her fingers were gnarled and knobby from years of work. In the end, all she was left with was her good name and the pride she had in her children's accomplishments.

Thus started the deep, stabbing pain in my chest. This kind of story, really...the universal story of motherhood, always leaves me feeling a little "damned if you do, damned if you don't". Abbie gave up everything of her own...her talents, her time, her figure (I can really relate to this), her life...for her children. The feminist in me resists....even feels slightly miserable that we women are expected and praised for being noble and altruistic, but void of personal achievement. The mother in me, however, wipes away a tear as I watch life from back stage instead of front and center, but wholly gets that my family is THE point. I get to clap and cheer and know that my efforts made this grand production possible.

Throughout the book, Abbie does women a great service by allowing herself to wonder "what if". What if she had married that other boy who wanted her but who she didn't quite love, the one whose wife now wears all those fine clothes? What if she and Will hadn't moved to Nebraska and avoided suffering through drought and grasshoppers and blizzards? What if she had kept at her singing...developed the talent that everyone acknowledged she had? What if, what if, what if? What if I had? What then? Is the prize for the correct choice happiness?

The fun in discussing this book would be hearing the strong arguments that defend the choices made at either end of the spectrum, and all the shades in between. Today, we lucky women get to choose whatever shade we like. Do we like how we look? Does it match our souls?

Abbie Deal chose motherhood but the story did not romanticize her choice. Abbie's story included every distracted husband, every sick child, every annoying friend and every moody child. And yet, in the end, Abbie sat as an old woman and felt satisfied that her five children were a fine product of her life's work.

I recommend this book to every woman out there who enjoys tales of pioneer life or more importantly, empathizes with the difficult decisions made by women everywhere...always.

The Book Thief

Here it is, only February, and I don't know if I'll be lucky enough to read a better book this year.

I only recently heard about The Book Thief when Jill mentioned it on her blog. She and several others gave it such a strong review that I looked it up on Goodreads. I was a little dismayed when I learned it was set in Nazi Germany, because, well...I wasn't sure what else could be written about that time that hadn't already been said, and said well by many different authors.

I'm so glad I didn't let that thought stop me. This is a quirky book. The narrator is Death, and death isn't a very typical story teller. There are these abrupt bold statements centered throughout the pages when Death feels further information is necessary. They bothered me at first because I couldn't get into my normal rhythm. And, sometimes, his little side comments seemed slightly irreverent. Wait, books don't do this. Not books about the holocaust and Nazi Germany. But this book did, and once I got used to it, I loved Death's little insights.

My favorite thing about this book is it's fairness about one of the most unfair times in human history. The unbelievably complicated situation that the German people were in, their motives, their fear, even their ignorance is not necessarily defended, but explained. Their story is told through Liesel, a young girl who watches her brother die on a train as she is being taken to live with foster parents. After her brother is buried, she snatches a book left in the snow called, The Gravediggers Handbook. Unable to read, she hides the book in her bed until her gentle and loving foster father finds it and uses it to teach her how.

It isn't really about the Germans and the Jews....it's about our human instincts to survive and our race towards death. Death has a really interesting perspective, which lends itself to many quote worthy statements.. His viewpoint (and I'm just assigning gender to him, I'm not sure he actually does) is a troubling one, a compassionate one, an irreverent one and one that left me sobbing tears onto the pages at its end.

While I think this book is suitable for every reader, those easily offended might be troubled by some German profanity. However, in my opinion, not only is it necessary and relevant to the character's communication, it's in a foreign language...which doesn't really count.

I'm grateful this book crossed my path. It touched me.

March

I rarely buy books. This is true for several reasons, but if I'm ever missing, you'd have a much better chance at finding me by looking in library rather than a bookstore.

However, last month, for Blogger Bookclub, we had a book exchange and I found myself in a bookstore perusing the shelves. First of all, I could quickly change my borrowing ways if I were forced to walk through a bookstore every day. I loved it! So many rectangular shapes that wanted to be slid off shelves and bent open. I found myself off task and reading the jackets of many a book.

Which is precisely how I found this gem. Booksellers tend to pimp their bestsellers by displaying their front covers as opposed to the binding, making it easier to catch the buyer's eye. Right at my eye level was the book Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. I surmised that it was about the plague and while that wasn't the type of story I was looking for, placed right next to it was Brooks's second, and equally acclaimed book: March, a 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner.

It is the story of Peter March, the absent father of Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth of Little Women. Much more up my alley, I replaced Year of Wonder back on the shelf and walked around with March until, ultimately I found an altogether different book and placed March back on the shelf too (I ended up walking out with The Emporer's Children, which I have yet to read.)

Not forgetting about my interest for March, I used my old-faithful-tried-and-true method of attaining books and placed a hold for the book from the library.

I think I should have bought it. It's a great book. Clever, poignant, informative, inspiring, heartbreaking, interesting and historical, Brooks takes Louisa May Alcott's famous Little Women, and writes a parallel story about their father's experience during the same year. Little snippets are taken from Little Women, and it's as though you can see that famous play happening in the background in each scene. Sort of like Wicked and The Wizard of Oz, only more serious and important. After all, Peter March wasn't out flying on a broom, he was trying to serve the Union troops in the United States own Civil War.

Brooks bases Peter on Alcott's own father's journals, just as Alcott based her Little Women on herself and her sisters. Bronson Alcott, and his fictional representative, Peter March, are part of the intellectual elite who reside in Concord Massachusetts alongside their contemporaries, Walden, Thoreau, Hawthorn and Brown, who each make an appearance in the story. Idealistic abolutionists with Quaker leanings, March leaves his family to support the union's cause to end slavery and finds great conflict between his inner values and his outward actions.

Brooks writes exclusively in the first person and as a result, I, the reader, was able to understand Peter March as he was, as he wanted to be and as he failed to be. He is a fantastic character. My only complaint with the book is that she abandoned Peter for a few chapters and wrote as Marmee, his wife, when he lay sick with fever. She eventually returns to Peter's voice, which gives the story the resolution it needs, and while Marmees' thoughts are equally moving and necessary, it made the ending a little choppy.

Despite that lack of continuity, I enthusiastically recommend March. It will force you to examine your own viewpoints about war, education, race, marriage, courage, pride and love.

The Piano Tuner

My mother gave me this book in Myanmar, which turned out to be the perfect book to read while I was in Myanmar.

Set in 19th century Burma, the British Army tries to keep a surgeon and Major, who has successfully negotiated and maintained peace in his outpost through creative and non-violent means, happy by fulfilling his request for an 1840 Erand grand piano. Months after its arrival, it becomes horribly out of tune, and the captain, Anthony Carrol, requests the services of a piano tuner.

In the late 1800s, travel to Burma took even longer than my 25 hour ordeal (I know! Instead, it took about a month by ship, train and horseback) so honoring either and especially both requests piqued the interest of the piano tuner hired for the job, Edgar Drake.

Through letters and official Army documents, the history and complicated situation of the British Empire in Burma is told. It's not the most entertaining thing to read, but the familiarity of some of the landscape and people sucked me in.

There is a story and plot that is worthy of its own discussion about complicated motives, allegiance and destiny, but the thing that impressed me the most was that this was written by a young man, out of college and taking off a year to study Malaria along the Thailand/Myanmar border, who wrote this before going to Medical School. Me thinks the boy has a bright future!

I'm not sure who to recommend this to. Anyone interested in Burma's history, for sure. And the folly of the British Empire (certainly, there are lessons to be learned from that!) but for most, I doubt the slow pace of this book would hold much interest. I'm glad I read it, though.

Thirteen Moons

Like Cold Mountain, this took me awhile to appreciate. But once I did, wow...there is so much beauty in words, landscape and life study to enjoy.

A sweeping epic of a man's life from the early 1800s to the end of the century in the American South, Frazier describes the harsh realities of a young and sometimes immature government as it expands its territory and faces its own human rights abuses. He does this through the life of Will Cooper, a bound boy on his own since his eleventh year and a man who eventually becomes a Chief, a lawyer, a senator, a Colonel and a vast land owner. His life is a lonely one, without family and without Claire, the love of his life. He compensates by devoting his life to the Cherokee and Bear, a clan Chief, who adopted him in his teenage years. While other clans are forced off their eastern mountain land to move west onto reservations, Will keeps them in their mountain home with his evasive lawyering skills which earns him much esteem but also much criticism. In the end, he ends up nearly as alone as when the book began.

Read this patiently. Enjoy its honesty and perspective. It is quietly satisfying.

Those Who Save Us

I've been on a sort of "girl-power" kick lately. Not overtly, but the last few books I've finished, I can't help but think of the independent, but limited-to-express, spirit of women throughout the ages. O-lan, in The Good Earth, felt all the things we modern women feel (anger, jealousy, humiliation, yearning, pride) but wasn't allowed to change her circumstance because of the culture and time she lived in. But her womanhood was there. God of Animals had a female protaganist, Still Summer was about the courage and will of females, albeit not my favorite characters, and Christabel LaMotte broke the mold of a victorian spinster with her intelligence and will.

The order of these books have been chosen purely on chance and yet the theme of a strong woman dominated my latest read as well.

Those Who Save Us, written by Jenna Blum, is an historical fiction novel set in Germany during World War II. Anna is an eighteen year old girl who falls in love with a Jewish doctor and finds the courage to finally stand up to her domineering father, a Nazi sympathizer and altogether unkind man, and hide her lover in her own home. When her father turns him over to the Gestapo, Anna leaves and lives and works with a woman who works with the Resistance Movement. Anna, pregnant and alone, is ultimately left with her own resources and determination to survive and protect her infant daughter. She does this by becoming the mistress of an SS officer after the woman she lives with and works for is executed for being a traitor.

My favorite thing about this was the recurring weaving of the title/theme throughout the many different story lines. The young daughter and her father. The Aryan and the Jew. The resistence worker and a pregnant woman. The SS and his mistress. The mother and her daughter. The Germans and the Americans. The daughter and her step father and ultimately her own adult lover, a Jew. What is the price of survival? What are the faces of those that save us? Our parents, our friends, our lovers, our enemies? This is a complicated story about the difficult and sometimes ugly choices a woman makes to survive, and the shame she endures for her choices.

The Fiery Cross

The Fiery Cross is the fifth book in a series written by Diana Gabaldon about Clare Fraser, who can travel through time by touching stones (think stonehenge). The first time she time travelled, it was an accident. She travelled two-hundred years backward to the 1740s and met the love her life, Jamie Frasier, a Scottish highlander. Their love story has developed through out each of the books as Gabaldon details the historical setting that surrounds them. In The Fiery Cross, the year is 1771 and the unrest and dissatisfaction of the colonists in the New World are humming. Even though the author uses almost 1,000 pages, the story progresses less than a year through time. That's an awful lot of information, in my opinion, without anything really happening to the characters. Jamie continues to lead, Clare continues to freak out everyone by practicing 20th century medicine in the 18th century, Briana continues to nurse (I couldn't believe how often the author had to point that out to us readers. Her breasts are hardened with milk again????) and Roger continues to be a complete fish out of water. In fact, I believe this book gets read solely because it is part of a series where the reader is already attached to the main characters. Separate it from the other books, and The Fiery Cross is unnecessarily wordy and quite dull.

This book came out four years after the previous book in this series, Drums of Autumn. Four years. I finished Drums of Autumn only few months ago and I was constantly confused by the many, many unimportant names of characters Gabaldon throws at her readers. Who? Is this important?

Turns out, not really. My theory as to why she bothers making it so complicated is that she is trying to convince the masses that these books are much more than fantasy romance, but legitimate historical fiction. She makes her point. Gabaldon clearly has done a lot of research about the living conditions, medicinal remedies, and political atmosphere of the pre-revolutionary war colonies. She included it all and then some. Lots and lots of digression about medicine that Claire Fraser would not have learned or remembered from her med school days. They do not teach microbiology stain techniques, or pathology to the extent that she would be the expert she always ends up being. Gabaldon seems to forget that Clare was a surgeon, and since she rarely gets to do surgery, the author flaunts what she's learned about medicine elsewhere in the book and always uses Clare as her medium. I find it annoying. Clare wouldn't know all of that stuff and making her some sort of superbrain takes away from the realness of her character. Why can't Claire just be wrong...or simply not know? She's pigeonholed her greatest characters. Jamie must be uberbrave. Claire must be ubersmart. Throw in some nookie a few times and you've got your book.

This took way too long for me to read. It simply wasn't very interesting. Until, of course, the very end. Around page 920, she finally threw in some of her good stuff - the time travel stuff. Genuine conflict and not just a side story that takes you somewhere for 100 pages without a purpose. Darn it...I'm going to have to read the next one!

Drums of Autumn

Yes - yet another book in the Diana Galbaldon series. They are addicting. But I'm going to take a little break for now because I have all these other books piling up and I know if I go and check out the next one, somehow it will get read before all these other worthy books. Series are like that. Especially good ones.

This is the fourth book in the time-traveling saga about super couple Jamie and Claire Fraser. While Claire stayed in the 18th century the entire story, her and Jamie's daughter, Brianna, became an integral part of the story and it was her adventures this time that crossed the time boundaries. Jamie and Claire's group make their way in the colonies of the new world. New dangers and challenges await them as they struggle with their feelings about slavery and Native Americans (still called Indians here) and the need to survive the political and natural climate of North Carolina. When their daughter, Brianna, comes across and old newspaper clipping reporting their deaths, she decides to travel back into time to meet the father she never knew and possibly to see if she can, indeed, change the past.

I have to admit that I'm saddened with the aging of Claire and Jamie. It was hard for me to make the mental leap that was necessary to put them into the role of grandparents. All of a sudden, I had to imagine wrinkles and grey hair and I didn't like it! Brianna and Roger take over as the hot young couple with the steamy romance but it isn't the same.

The difference between Gabaldon's writing of her male and female characters was very apparent to me throughout this book. Most of the males are either very good or very bad while the females live more in the grey. Of course, there are exceptions but I thought she romanticized the males a bit more and the females were annoyingly truer to life. For instance, Claire and her moral dilemma over abortion and the struggle between being everything to everyone. Jamie, Roger and even the stubbornly homosexual Lord Grey are allowed to always try do the right thing and when they don't, the error of their ways almost immediately come to haunt them. My overall feeling is that her males are more likable because they behave less bratty. Maybe it was just this particular story though, which wasn't my favorite. I liked the story better in Europe but realize the need for fresh material. Putting them in this historical context gives the author what she needs to continue her epic.