Book 3 - Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates

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It absolutely surprises me that Joyce Carol Oates has been publishing since 1964 and that this book was the first that I had ever written by her because it is apparent that she is a careful, adept and fluent writer. This book is set in Carthage, a very real town in upstate NY, nearly as far North as you can get without entering into Canada. It is a small town, so the shock that runs throughout the town and the Mayfield family when their somewhat dysfunctional 19 year old daughter Cressida disappears in the Adirondack Mountains is a living and palpable feeling. As the community gathers and begins the search for her, evidence against a disabled Iraq war veteran named Brett Kincaid (who ironically was engaged to be married to Cressida's older sister) seems to mount.

During the course of the novel, we are treated to alternating perspectives, one of which includes the flashbacks to the atrocities that Kincaid witnessed while he was in the service. His memories are often jumbled with the violence that occurs in Carthage and intrudes on everything in his new, quiet life in Carthage. The plot often takes bizarre and unexpected turns, just enough so that the reader is kept on the edge of the seat as much by those turns as by Oates' magnificent prose. There were times that I felt that it was hard to empathize with some of the characters and the choices that they made; however this didn't detract from the message that the novel was sending: that the damage that war wrought is complex and tears at every fiber of the fabric of our society. It impacts everything from the individual to the family unit to the criminal justice system. Loved this book. It's something that should be added to your library immediately.

Allegiant and Insurgent by Veronica Roth

I read these novels back to back. It seemed fitting to do it this way so that I didn't forget anything in between the two books, particularly since Divergent is a cliffhanger. I can't give you a complete review of these books at this time without spoilers, but I will try my best.

Allegiant is the final installment in the series and is told from alternating viewpoints: both Tobias and Tris give their own accounts. I found this to be a really good difference and divergence (no pun intended) from Roth's previous two novels because, while I enjoyed living in Tris' head, I also was very curious about Tobias and his experience. Frankly, there is also so much you can take of the sort of angst that Tris has and I really enjoyed the widening of the experiences that Tobias' experiences give. It also really shows the differences between how one person, Tris, views actions of Tobias and how he views his own actions (and which are often completely different). This was generally a really great ending to a strong and respectable YA, dystopian series.

Insurgent was the second novel in the series. For me, it cemented Tris' roll as both an action hero and as a loyal and multifaceted friend and teammate. She was very strong and three dimensional as a character but also realistic in the sense that she was a character that could be someone you would know in real life. I really enjoyed this book because it also ramps up the romance between Tris and Tobias and begins to highlight the struggles they must face. Loved the cliffhanger at the end.

Dear Life by Alice Munro

I have so many reviews and so little time! I'm generally not a tremendous fan of short stories; however Alice Munro is one of those few authors who can succinctly and powerfully capture a whole life in the span of a handful of pages, masterfully. And that is something that I enjoy and respect. Many of these stories are set in rural Canada, probably where Ms. Munro herself grew up. Many look back, in 20/20 hindsight, on events that occurred in childhood and that is the event on which the entire story is focussed. I did really enjoy the story, "Haven" in which a passive-agressive woman rebels (albeit passively-aggressively), in spite of having spent the great majority of time deferring to the antisocial opinions of her husband. I liked it because it was the portrait of a woman who are caught in the midst of changing social expectations and norms. The passive aggressive woman was caught between the compelling and strong needs to be independent and the need to belong, between freedom and domesticity (it was the end of the 60's and beginning of the seventies, when feminism was striving to change how we think about gender roles). I also really liked "Gravel," a very haunting tale about a young girl, whose older sister throws herself and the family dog into a lake and the narrator fails to summon help in a timely fashion.

The last four pieces are perhaps the most interesting of all the pieces. They are not fictional short stories but are purely memoir and allow us a small window into the workings of Ms. Munro and her life. I liked them because I got a really good sense of what it was like for Ms. Munro coming of age in a small, rural Canadian town. They don't necessarily resolve neatly and follow tidy boundaries, but that is what makes them so good, since life doesn't necessarily follow the tidy, neat boundaries.

I enjoyed reading this book immensely

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Spinning the Law by Kendall Coffey

I have written a review of this for my local bar association. The review can be found here.

The Night Film by Marisha Pessl

The true believers only come out at night, at least to watch the psychologically horrific films that Stanislas Cordova creates in Marisha Pessl's latest novel. The movies are screened in abandoned buildings at night and only the initiated know about them. Specifically, the devoted initiates know to look for a red bird on the doors or walls to tell them that this is the building in which the latest Cordova movie is to be screened. What makes the director even more curious is that he has become a recluse - mostly because people suspect that he has something to hide or has done something more unsavory than his movies. Scott McGrath is the protagonist and definitely has a vendetta - a few years before we meet him as he's jogging around Central Park at 2 in the morning, he got sued for libel, lost and was disgraced for writing a story about Cordova. When Cordova's daughter, Ashley, who is talented beyond belief, suffers from an untimely death, he sees the opportunity that he's been hoping for. He is absolutely her death was caused by some of the awful things she suffered at her father's hands and sets out to investigate.

The book is not only a trove of thriller but it also includes fake webpages, marked up pictures and other multimedia forms that make this book more than the normal book. You can download the app from the ITunes App Store and use it on certain pages in the book to unlock the extras. It makes for a multilayered and fascinating reading experience. What made this book even more fascinating to me was that she kept Cordova tantalizingly just beyond the page that I was reading - it was as if I looked hard enough into the shadows at the edge of the light, I could see him there and be able to talk to him myself, but when I tried, it was as elusive for me as it was for McGrath. It didn't end up being everything that I wanted it to be; however I was hooked and I read all 600 pages of it in about three days - the chapters are often really short, which makes for quick reading and lots of easy breaks. Definitely worth a shot

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The Round House by Louise Erdrich

This book is set on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota in 1988, give or take a few years. The protagonist is Joe Coutts, a thirteen year old member of the Ojibwe tribe and whose mother is brutally beaten and raped in the tribe's Round House. The Round House is a place of prominence in the tribe's culture as that is where a number of religious ceremonies are held, including the Sweat Lodges. His father, Bazil, is a lawyer and the town's tribal judge, making the violation that occurred even that much more horrific. Because Joe's mother is extremely unclear as to what happened and where due to her injuries and her seeming unwillingness (who can really blame her) to remember what happened to her, it's hard to figure out who committed the offense and in what jurisdiction each event happened. This is significant because it could be a federal offense, a state offense or a tribal offense, with the ramifications of each being extremely different (for instance, on Indian land, whites can't be prosecuted). Joe watches, seemingly helplessly, as his mother sinks further and further into depression - so badly that she can't get out of bed, let alone care for herself. As Joe watches this, he and his friends decide to take matters into their own hands and to seek out the perpetrator and effect their own punishment.

THis book was absolutely masterful. It is both a coming of age story and a detective novel combined in one. In the first chapters, we meet Joe as a young and innocent boy and the picture that Erdrich paints, while using simple language, paints a very poignant picture of a boy that's just hanging out with his friends. That is taken away from him brutally when his mother is attacked and you feel the loss immensely. Her stories and characters are seemingly universal - I mean, you get that boys sneak cigarettes and beer - but you also know that the impact and experience of Joe is unique to him because of who he is - a Native American boy growing up on a reservation near the turn of the century. I loved how she also used the novel to educate the reader - possibly a majority white audience - about the struggles that Native Americans face, particularly poverty and assault related issues. This book is highly recommended.

The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe

We learn pretty much at the beginning of this utterly engrossing book that Will Schwalbe's mother had Stage IV pancreatic cancer. Yes, thats the terminal kind that has metastasized to many other organs of a person's body. While this may have been devastating to most people (and was to Will, his siblings and the rest of his family), his indomitable mother continues to live a *really* active life. She juggles her treatments with her other obligations and her pleasures, most notably her voracious appetite for reading. During her treatments, Will (also a tremendous reader in a family of readers) will read the same books that his mother does and discuss them with her in great depth.

I'm normally very hesitant about books about books - they can go so horribly wrong so quickly; however this one was really good in part because it's not a Cliffs note version of books, and because it's also a memoir of his mother's struggle with cancer and because he's such a good writer. I think that one of the best compliments that I can give for this book is that I wish that I had known Will's mother and that this was the most wonderful tribute anyone could have made to their mother because it conveyed how wonderful she was while also imparting her gift of her love of books to the rest of us. While this book isn't upbeat (it's about cancer and death), it's not maudlin at all and parts of it are truly uplifting. I got ideas for books to read and topics to meditate on at a time in my life when I really and truly needed them to distract me or educate me or both. It re-affirmed my love of books, and reading and the act of reading and digesting what I've read. It re-affirmed the importance of family at a time that I was struggling to figure family out. This is a must read.