Archive for June, 2009
The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway (Knopf $25.95) is a rollicking adventure story set in a post-apocalyptic world. The unthinkable has occurred and people are struggling to keep life going as they once knew it. A surprising plot twist towards the end radically changes your understanding of what has happened. This book grabbed me by the lapels with its smart, funny and energetic writing by Our Hero. Warning: Don’t start this before bed. It is a page turner and a perfect read for a rainy day or a sunny vacation or any time you want to escape to a new world. ~Gretchen Echols
Jenny Shimada is a fugitive from justice living a quiet life in rural New York when she is found by a former associate and convinced to help some younger radicals on the run. Thrown together in an old farmhouse 30 miles from the nearest town, they negotiate resentment and distrust into tense workable relationships as months pass with no exit in sight. A surprise visit from the landlord pushes them into action with catastrophic results. Susan Choi’s fascinating and riveting novel American Woman (Harper $13.95) presents the psychological and emotional complexity of 1960’s radical action and life after going underground. Her clear and compassionate view of Jenny as she seeks to understand and reconcile her past with her current situation, keeps the reader fully engaged from beginning to end. ~ Marla Vandewater
A raging fire in the sugarcane fields of eastern Cuba opens Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner (Scribner $25.00). The time is 1958, shortly before the Americans were driven out by Castro’s revolution. Tropical Cuba in the 50’s seems to be an idyllic setting for young Everly Lederer and K.C. Stites who are coming of age in the gated American enclave in the company town of Preston. Far away in Havana a cabaret dancer’s work life is intertwined with Presidents Prio and Batista and a French agitator called La Maziere. She is sympathetic to Castro and he is running guns to the rebels in the hills and forming an attachment to the dancer. Growing up in eastern Washington, I was unclear about Cuba’s actual distance from US mainland and why it was so important to us. Although this story takes place before the Bay of Pigs, it helps to explain what led up to that fiasco. Told in deceptively low key prose this gripping tale reveals the secrets and prejudices of the Americans contrasted with the incredible poverty and brutal working conditions of the cane cutters and the Cuban people in general. I was fascinated with this story of Cuba. ~ Gretchen Echols
Lehane’s large-canvas historical yarn steers a twisted and intriguing course through a post-World War I America that’s preoccupied with racism, sports and fear of communist incursions, beset by disease and divided by class. In these pages, he tells of Luther Laurence, a young black man who falls in with the wrong crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and flees both murder charges and a pregnant wife, landing in Boston and the employ of the Coughlin family. The Coughlins aren’t long off the boat from Ireland, but they’ve established themselves within the local police ranks. In addition to Laurence, Lehane focuses here on idealistic cop Danny Coughlin, the rising son of an influential police captain, who supplies the principal window through which we witness the misnamed “Spanish flu pandemic” of 1918; the Wilson administration’s campaign against radicals; and the notorious 1919 Boston Police Strike. There’s so much story in The Given Day, that the reader may have trouble keeping a handle on it all. But Lehane does an exceptional job of moving his plot along, whether with the romance between Danny Coughlin and a young Irish woman holding too many secrets; or the low-boil confrontation between Laurence and a powerful, conniving cop; or the rivalry between Boston’s mayor and Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, who would eventually ride his much-inflated role in ending the police strike directly to the White House. And the author’s portrayal of baseball star Babe Ruth, who winds through this yarn like a lazy river, popping up periodically for comic relief or to assist in illuminating the era’s culture, is marvelous. - Jeff Pierce
In The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee (Viking $25.95) two women love the same man in exotic Hong Kong before, during and ten years after WWII. The story relates difficult choices and their consequences as a result of loves, intrigues and betrayals. The setting gives some hints at the complex relationships between clashing cultures and ancient histories. This beguiling story is quietly related amidst the hot steamy backdrop of south-east Asia. I was mesmerized. ~Gretchen Echols
