The Good Wife by Stewart O'Nan

No, this isn't the CBS series (which is also wonderful and a must see!), but a novel by Stewart O'Nan.

This novel follows the life of a seemingly ordinary woman over a tremendously long period of time: we meet her when she is pregnant with her first and only child and we leave her after her son has graduated from college and taken his first job. When we meet Patty Dickerson, her husband, Tommy, has committed a crime at the beginning of the novel while he is drunk and ends up serving a sentence of 28 years for first degree murder.  Patty gives birth to their son while Tommy is incarcerated.

I loved this short novel for quite a few reasons.  The novel is told from Patty's perspective, so you really get a good feel for what it's like to be in her shoes.  You get the sense of the time from the snippets of the outside world that seep into the small portion of Patty's conscience being that isn't preoccupied with Tommy, his case and surviving. For instance, at the beginning, Patty and her family watch Hawai'i: 5-0.  At other points during the novel, she talks about watching documentaries about the hostages in Iran that are freed when Reagan is sworn into office. This is also powerful because it highlights the isolation that Patty must surely feel, even though she is surrounded by a family, albeit a somewhat dysfunctional one, that manages to bond together to support her and her son, Casey, in their years of need. Patty's life is difficult - her physical pleasures are few and far between. She lives from paycheck to paycheck and often works in the most demeaning and menial jobs that one can find - waitressing, roadwork and construction, housekeeping in a hospital - barely making minimum wage and working so hard just to make ends meet.

She struggles to raise her son, Casey, who is an overweight, sensitive, introspective but really f'in' smart kid that applies everywhere from Cal Poly to MIT and Cornell. While raising him, she struggles to impart to him that Tommy as a father is more than a concept, even though Casey has only known Tommy as the guy in the greens that he sees once in a while at the prison and on family reunion weekends, when he and his mom are allowed to spend the weekend with Tommy in a trailer on the prison grounds. Talk about tough...and yet O'Nan is able to convey all of these struggles in such an delicate and wondrous manner. There aren't any histrionics or fireworks and yet, you get the struggles that Patty faces and the marginality that she endures.

It also completely humanizes the families of the people that stand accused of crimes as well as the Accused themselves. This reason, in and of itself, would make this novel worth the read; however it on top of the other wonderful things that O'Nan accomplishes make this a must read for all.

Love it...a must read.

Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Wow.  That's all I can say about this powerful, gritty novel. NPR really picked a winner for this one.

Margaret "Margo" Crane is the protagonist of this novel - she lives in rural Michigan in the 1970's. When we first meet Margo, she is 15 but is no way your ordinary 15 year old teenage girl. Margo lives with her father on the river, after her mother abandoned them, and can shoot, skin and hunt like no one else.  In some ways, she's like her idol: Annie Hall in that she is a trailblazer - no other girls in the area are like her. Margo is often in extremely heartbreaking situations. Her uncle rapes her quite early on in the novel and she is such a good shooter that she manages to shoot off the tip of his penis. She also watches her father die in front of her and that is just the beginning of the heartbreak.

This book doesn't have a strict plot per se. It's more about how Margo learns about herself, learns to become self-sufficient and learns to accept herself for who and what she is. I found myself really liking Margo initially and, as I got to know her character during the novel, admiring her spirit, her gutsiness and her unabashed sense of who she was. She was who she was and she wasn't going to change it for anyone - you could take or leave it.  What you saw was what you got.  I loved that.  Campbell managed to write a novel that was raw and sharp in portraying Margo's life - her life isn't easy by any stretch of the imagination and often, I felt like I was reading about the lives of others that I have met during my life.  And yet, Margo doesn't give up. She keeps going and in the end, she perseveres because she has learned to support herself without the assistance of anyone, let alone a man.

Wonderful, powerful, amazing. a must read for this year.

The Little Women Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly

Reading seems to be the only way for me to escape these days.  I picked up this book because the premise was interesting but to be quite frank, it ended up falling flat for me.

In this novel by Gabrielle Donelly, the Little Women that we all know and love aren't the main characters per se: they are the foremothers to the main characters in the novel. Emma, Lulu and Sophie are sisters and their great-great- grandmother is Jo March. Of course, her sisters are Amy, Meg and Beth. Emma, the oldest, is smart (but not brilliant), has a settled career and is soon to be married.  Lulu is brilliant but less settled - she doesn't have a job even though she graduated at the top of her class with a science degree (chemistry I think) and on the romance front she doesn't appear to have many prospects either.  Sophie is the youngest and a flighty actress.  They live in London - their American mother and English father also live in London in a house where Lulu finds old letters to and from Jo March in the attic.

I loved Little Women - it was a fantastic book and I absolutely loved reading it. Of course, Jo was inspirational and Beth and her short life were sad.  So I was really hopeful that this book would pan out. But it fell flat. I didn't find the premise or the characters or anything about the novel original. It was as if Donelly had taken Little Women and tried to adapt it to modern London.  The characters were so obviously modern day versions of the Little Women and the other characters in Alcott's novel. This annoyed me to no end - if you're going to do something like this then come up with something new. And because Donnelly seemed to be a creative and decent writer otherwise, I was even more disappointed in her inability to come up with a novel idea.

Pass on this one.

Catching Santa (The Kringle Chronicles, Book 1) by Marc Franco

Just to be up front, I got this as an advance reader copy to review from LibraryThing.Com.

This is the first in the Kringle series by Marc Franco and is a young adult novel.  In it, Jakob is an 11 year boy that is easily distracted, doesn't pay attention and can often be found doodling in class instead of listening to his teachers. On the last day before Christmas vacation, Jakob is teased mercilessly when his classmates steal some of his doodles (featuring Santa!) and pass them around to each other. Jakob, later that day, receives two mysterious emails from S.R. that essentially tell him that the best way to make people who don't believe in Santa actually believe in him is to catch Santa. Later on in the novel, we learn that the main antagonist from the day before break - Rick- is missing and actually makes a panicked call to Jakob, prompting Jakob to being his search for Rick and eventually, Santa himself.

The story itself was was a tremendous story. I enjoyed it and I think that it would appeal to younger children as well - there is a lot for them to relate to and to imagine.  However, there were some drawbacks that would make me hesitate to recommend this for a child say under the age of 7.  Mr. Franco uses some words that may not be understandable to younger readers. Some words used by Jakob aren't words that I would think that an 11 year old would understand, let alone use in their everyday speech. For instance, the word portly is used - what 11 year old actually knows what that word means let alone uses it?  Other words, such as hyperactive, appear when Jakob is talking, which is also unreasonable for most 11 year olds. The editing also needed some work - there were a lot of run on sentences that could have been split into multiple sentences. It was a good first book, with good ideas and showed a lot of creativity and potential.  Hope to see more from this author.

Simple Justice by John Morgan Wilson

So, I had never heard of the Benjamin Justice mystery series and I'm not quite sure what led me to request this particular book from the library.  I was immediately drawn into this novel by John Morgan Wilson.

In the first of the series, a young man is murdered outside of a gay bar in Los Angeles.  A young Latino man is found kneeling over him and is arrested and charged with his murder. Perhaps most damning, he has has confessed to killing the young man that he has been found with.  The young man turns out to be related to a wealthy family and is also discovered to be a coke head. Benjamin Justice is a disgraced journalist - he had written a series for the LA Times that had won him prestigious awards and was soon discovered to have been completely made up - and also struggling with alcoholism and the loss of his partner.  He is asked by his former boss to look into the murder of the young man, so he does.

I wasn't sure if I was going to like this book when I first started it but I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Mr. Wilson's writing style is simple and the novel is a quick read.  But appearances can be deceiving - this book is hardly shallow or simple.  Benjamin Justice is a character that is deep and has extensive mental and physical wounds and an intriguing back story and current struggle that quickly hooked me and made me want to know him more.  He was the sort of character that, if he were a real, live person, would be someone that I would take out to lunch or dinner in the hopes of learning more about him and his life experiences.  The cast of characters that flesh out the book are also memorable, although I found that some of them could be stereotypes - for instance, the brother of the young man charged with homicide is a colorful, homophobe complete with violence and guns.  He was so predictable and so stereotyped and that turned me off a little bit.  I did enjoy the issues that Mr. Wilson tried to take on in this book - the AIDS epidemic in the gay male community in LA, some homophobia (yes, the out and out violent type, but also the more subtle type - a woman who is obviously attracted to Ben Justice and is constantly making both physical and emotional passes at him in the hopes of changing him), the struggles of being in the closet.

Generally a pretty good read.

Daughters of the Revolution by Carolyn Cooke

I was mesmerized by the review that I read of this book in the Times.   I tend to enjoy reading books about colleges and prep schools and the strife that often occurs between students and/or within the students that are the center of the novel. So that's why I was drawn to this novel.

The novel focuses, mainly, on a New England all-male prep school in the 60's.  The school, which is nearly all white and is all male, is struggling with issues of race and socioeconomic status and the headmaster is trying to decide if the school should go coed when the first female is accidentally admitted (her name is Carole, a name that the secretary mistakenly thinks is male).  Not only is Carole female, but she is black and from the lower middle class, so she makes everyone uncomfortable.

This book was a bit disconcerting to read, although it ended up being moderately enjoyable. It was disconcerting because it often jumped around from first person to third person and often dealt with many different characters - sometimes you were learning about EV (the daughter of one of the prep school boys), the headmaster, Carole or EV's mother and it often took me a few pages to get used to the change in voice and figure out who I was dealing with exactly.  The characters themselves were what made the book enjoyable. They were engaging, multi-faceted, entertaining and three dimensional. I wanted to see more of them, learn about the challenges that they faced and were facing and I wanted to see them through until the end.  They made the novel worthy of the limited amount of time that I have to spend on books.

Moderately enjoyable enough to get out of the library but probably not enough to buy.

The Whore's Child and Other Stories by Richard Russo

I have loved Richard Russo ever since I read Empire Falls way back when.  So when I saw this book in the library I picked it up and brought it home.

This is a collection of short stories about mundane, ordinary lives.  But I was still enthralled and absolutely enamored nonetheless. Russo has a way of depicting such lives in a way that you absolutely can't rip your eyes away from, no matter how "boring" you would think that they would have been normally. Somehow, Russon manages to draw you into these lives and make them interesting.

Perhaps the best story in the book is the title story.  It is about a nun who was born out of wedlock to a woman that worked as a prostitute and who had, essentially, had her pimp drop her off at the school run by the nuns of the order when she was a young child.

All of the stories are a pleasure to read. As I say, Russo has a way with words and draws you into the lives of the characters so much so that you just can't rip your eyes away. A must read.