Seattle author, Erica Bauermeister’s first novel The School of Essential Ingredients (Putnam $24.95) is pure delight. It tells the story of eight students who gather each week for a cooking lesson from Lillian, a world-class chef who needs no lists and no recipes. For her, smells are “what printed words are for others, something alive that grew and changed.” She tells her students they will learn what they need to. With each lesson, friendships form, memories are evoked, and the characters learn as much about life as they do food. The writing is as sensual and satisfying as a good, slow meal. As Lillian says, the most essential ingredient of all is time -”the weeks it takes to ripen a tomato, the years to grow a fig tree. And every meal you cook is time out of your day - but you all know that”. Read this book on a Sunday afternoon, then create a pot of soup! ~Carol Santoro
In The Tsar’s Dwarf, by Peter Fogtdal, Sorine is a middle aged dwarf hired by the court of Danish King Frederick to jump out of a cake to entertain visiting Tsar Peter the Great. The next thing she knows she has been given to the Tsar, a collector of human oddities. In Russia, despite various demeaning situations, she continually asserts her intelligence and wit while retaining her dignity as a human being. Through her eyes we see life at the Russian court, in an Orthodox religious cloister, as a member of the Tsar’s museum of human curiosities and in the family of a wealthy Polish merchant. Elegant crystalline prose creates a multi-layered narrative as we follow Sorine on her journey. She is a captivating spit-fire of a woman, forging a life for herself in a hostile world. ~ Gretchen Echols
In The Niagara River Kay Ryan, our poet laureate for 2008-2009, writes brief, dense poems that are deceptively easy to read. The spare language is packed with meanings that imply greater things. Each short line vaults the reader forward by miles and results in arriving that much closer to the inarticulate. Her short poems contain many surprises in both internal and slant kinds of rhyme combined with exact rhyme. Ryan describes poetry as an intensely personal experience for both the writer and the reader. “The poem is operating so deeply in you that it is the most special kind of reading.” This is a slim volume holding gems of language, wit and wisdom that holds firm with many readings. ~ Gretchen Echols
“The poem is a raid on the inarticulate.” ~T.S. Eliot
Author Edwards spent 33 years on his manuscript, beginning when he was still a young English teacher in 1974. Such labors of love either turn out to be masterpieces of development or messes of over-thinking. Fortunately, The Little Book (Dutton $25.95) is one of the former. It’s part of a subgenre of unlikely time-travel tales, in which the “how” of transportation through the years is pretty much ignored in favor of appreciating the consequences of the journey. In Edwards’ story, teenage baseball star-turned-California rock musician Stan “Wheeler” Burden, attacked by an unknown assailant in 1988 San Francisco, tumbles backward to 1897 Vienna. There, he must adapt as best he can, striking up the most unlikely association with Sigmund Freud, and meeting his own father — another victim of this time dislocation — as well as his grandparents. In addition to discovering more about his father’s life and that of a former mentor, Burden helps fill out a vivid picture of Vienna before World War I, when it was still considered the intellectual capital of Europe. He must also contend with one moralistic dilemma after another, as he falls in love with a woman from his future and considers the opportunity of killing Adolf Hitler while he’s still a boy. The author obviously had fun contriving the lengthy arc of circumstances that will lead to Burden’s attack in 1988, but he shows even more delight in re-creating a long-ago and ostensibly promising era. If it took Edwards 33 years to write The Little Book, I fear we won’t see another work of fiction from him. Thank goodness his first novel is so memorable. - Jeff Pierce
Come to Moscow. It will be fun. With these words Fin entices her gay half brother Darcy. One year older, Fin has always held an uneasy allure. It is February 1984, In Russia homosexuals are persecuted. His passport is confiscated. Inexplicable encounters with men and Fin’s odd behavior pull him in different directions as over the course of a week his life goes wildly out of control. Part cold war thriller, part family drama, STRAY DOG WINTER (Macadam Cage $24.00) by David Francis will get your heart pounding. ~ Marla Vandewater
When crime novelist Mickey Spillane died in 2006, he left behind five unfinished novels featuring his hardest of hard-boiled private eyes, Mike Hammer. He stipulated that they should go to his friend, fellow writer, and occasional collaborator Max Allan Collins. Collins is now completing and publishing those books in Spillane’s memory. The first came out this fall: The Goliath Bone (Harcourt, $23), which is, chronologically speaking, the last Hammer, bringing the aging New York City gumshoe’s career to a fitting (and fittingly violent) close. While Hammer stories are often timeless, this one is tied firmly to the post-September 11 world. It builds around the discovery, in Israel’s Valley of Elah, of an oversized thigh bone said to be have once belonged to Goliath, the legendary Philistine giant felled by a slingshot-wielding David. The two young people who found this artifact are now threatened in Manhattan by both al-Qaeda terrorists and Israeli extremists, so they turn to Hammer for protection. In short order, Hammer and his secretary turned fiancée, Velda Sterling, are mixing it up with international assassins, federal agents, archaeologists, Broadway showmen, and at least one retired cop who’s having a hard time staying out of trouble. The Goliath Bone doesn’t send Hammer in a new direction, or cause one to rethink Spillane’s series as a whole. It’s a solid capper to Hammer’s professional arc, though, and a valuable reminder of this series’ strengths — fast action, a fully realized protagonist, and mayhem not inconsistent with Hammer’s urban jungle milieu and the dangers of his assignments. — Jeff Pierce
Chilling is the only word for Richard Flanagan’s impeccably written The Unknown Terrorist (Grove $14.00). Gina Davies, known as “the Doll” at the Chairman’s Lounge where she is employed as a pole dancer is fixated on saving enough money to put a down payment on an apartment. She seeks to wipe out her westie trash roots by buying designer label everything. Mardi Gras Saturday night in Sydney, she goes out into the street and dances with a stranger who invites her back to his apartment. When she wakes up in the morning he is gone. Sipping coffee at the cafe next door, she watches black clad police descend on the neighborhood, surrounding the building she has just exited. Later, at home, she sees news of the police raid including what is referred to as security camera footage of the terrorist suspect in an attempted bombing, and his unknown female accomplice. It is her. For the next five days she is on the run as the security forces and media twist every aspect of her life to fit their needs for justification and self promotion. As her understanding of the way of the world and her place in it darken, so does her resolution as to what she must do. It is Australia, but it could be anywhere in the post 9/11 culture of fear. ~ Marla Vandewater
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
