America, America by Ethan Canin

America, America by Ethan Canin
336 pages
Published June 2008 by Random House Adult Trade Publishing

Synopsis:
In the early 1970s, Corey Sifter, the son of working-class parents, becomes a yard boy on the grand estate of the powerful Metarey family. Soon, through the family’s generosity, he is a student at a private boarding school and an aide to the great New York senator Henry Bonwiller, who is running for president. Before long, Corey finds himself involved with one of the Metarey daughters as well, and he begins to leave behind the world of his upbringing. As the Bonwiller campaign gains momentum, Corey finds himself caught up in a complex web of events in which loyalty, politics, sex, and gratitude conflict with morality, love, and the truth. Ethan Canin’s stunning novel is about America as it was and is, a remarkable exploration of how vanity, greatness, and tragedy combine to change history and fate.

My review:
So I never could understand why anyone was impressed with Henry Bonwiller--I never felt like he was being sincere when he gave his little "for the people" speeches, so I had a hard time buying into the idea that so many people would be so willing to do so much for him. I was surprised that Corey didn't have a hard time with the fact that this family that has him to dinner, takes him on a boat trip, sends him to school still considers him not much more than an employee. I also felt like the last part of this book dragged on a bit. That said, I really enjoyed this study of loyalty, morality, and obligation as it explored our class system, political system and the media.

I listened to this one and was really impressed with the narration, as was Devourer of Books who wrote:
"Oh. My. Gosh. Don’t tell my husband, but I might have a little audio crush on the narrator, Robertson Dean. He has such a gorgeous voice, mellow, but with lots of emotion. He kept me calmly focused on the story through the worst traffic jams and the most annoying house cleaning. " I concur!

"a mercy" by Toni Morrison

a mercy by Toni Morrison
176 pages
Published November 2008 by Knopf Publishing

Synopsis:
In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.

Jay, at http://quickiebooks.blogspot.com says: "Mention the name Morrison and little else needs to be said. Of course it's an intense and tragic read worth every page. But it's not just about slavery. It's about the backdrop of intolerance, class and religious, that breeds the kind of culture where slavery seems justified, sometimes even to the enslaved themselves."

My review:
Morrison has literally woven this novel together--changing points of view and narrators frequently and giving a fully fleshed out back story to all of the characters she introduces. At it's heart, "a mercy" is the story of a mother who gives up her daughter to save her and the daughter who spends the rest of her life feeling abandoned. Every character in the story is rootless--from the slave girl, Florens, to the Native American, Lina, who is the sole survivor of a plague, to Jacob Vaark, the farmer/merchant the brings the characters together. The book is beautifully written and if you choose to listen to this on CD, you'll get the added benefit of Morrison as narrator. It feels like your grandmother is reading to you and you don't want the story to end.

What Happened To Anna K? by Irina Reyn

What Happened To Anna K? by Irina Reyn
256 pages
Published August 2008 by Simon Shuster Adult Publishing

Synopsis:
Vivacious thirty-seven-year-old Anna K. is comfortably married to Alex, an older, prominent businessman from her tight-knit Russian-Jewish immigrant community in Queens. But a longing for freedom is reignited in this bookish, overly romantic, and imperious woman when she meets her cousin Katia Zavurov's boyfriend, an outsider and aspiring young writer on whom she pins her hopes for escape. As they begin a reckless affair, Anna enters into a tailspin that alienates her from her husband, family, and entire world.
In nearby Rego Park's Bukharian-Jewish community, twenty-seven-year-old pharmacist Lev Gavrilov harbors two secret passions: French movies and the lovely Katia. Lev's restless longing to test the boundaries of his sheltered life powerfully collides with Anna's. But will Lev's quest result in life's affirmation rather than its destruction?


My review:
I was eagerly looking forward to reading this book after hearing a review on NPR. Amazon picked it as a "Book of the Month." Newspapers and magazine across the country had included reviews. That may account for my disappointment with this book--my expectations were just too high. Reyn does a terrific job of resetting Tolstoy's novel, giving the reader a marvelous background in Russian immigrant society, vivid descriptions of the characters and settings.

Anna is a beautiful woman who has not concept of how to have a decent relationship; she only sees men as conquests and finds most women beneath her. She is supposed to be very intelligent but this is a woman whose life choices are almost never based on reality but rooted, instead, in the happily-ever-after myth. The NPR reviewer felt that Reyn had made Anna a character that modern women could empathize with. I disagree--I think most women with find Anna selfish and arrogant. Unlike the original Anna, it's no longer a social disaster to leave your husband but when this Anna finds herself feeling stuck in her marriage, she doesn't just file for divorce, get a job and fight for her son. Instead, she allows herself to be drawn into a "great" love and walks away from her child. Had I liked her better, maybe I would have liked the book more.

The Mighty Queens of Freeville by Amy Dickinson

The Mighty Queens of Freeville by Amy Dickinson
240 pages
Published February 2009 by Hyperion
Source: borrowed this one from the library

Dickinson is the author of the syndicated advice column "Ask Amy" which appears in more than 150 newspapers nationwide and appears on several NPR shows.

Synopsis:
This is the tale of Amy, her daughter and the women in her family who helped raise them after Amy's husband abruptly left. It is a story of frequent failures and surprising successes, as Amy starts and loses careers, bumbles through blind dates and adult education classes, travels across country with her daughter, and tries to come to terms with the family's aptitude for "dorkitude." Though they live in London, D.C., and Chicago, all roads lead them back to her original hometown of Freeville (pop. 458), a tiny upstate village where Amy's family has tilled and cultivated the land, tended chickens and Holsteins, and built houses and backyard sheds for over 200 years. Most important though, her family has made more family there, and they all still live in a ten-house radius of each other. With kindness and razor-sharp wit, they welcome Amy and her daughter back weekend after weekend, summer after summer, offering a moving testament to the many women who have led small lives of great consequence in a tiny place.

The Book Lady, at http://thebookladysblog.com/, says: The Mighty Queens of Freeville is full of quirky stories and insightful thoughts on life. It will make you laugh out loud. It will make you smile as you recognize characters familiar from your own life, and it will bring tears to your eyes as you remember the difficult moments of your own life. More than anything else, this book will make you want to pick up the phone and call your mother, favorite aunt, and closest girlfriends and tell them exactly how much you love and appreciate them.

My review:
The Book Lady is right--this book made me laugh out loud again and again. My husband got tired of me reading whole passages to him (apparently things just aren't as funny when you do this!). This book will make the rounds through the women of my family. Some really awful things have happened to Dickinson--her father abandoned the family and her husband leaves her for another woman. But Dickinson never gets maudlin, nor does she use this opportunity to bash these men. Instead she focuses on the humor, love and family that help her get through her life as she tries to find her way. Is it a great book? Perhaps not. But I loved it!

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
432 pages
Published May 2007

Chabon is a Pulitzer Prize winner for "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay" and also wrote "Wonder Boys" which was made into a movie starring Michael Douglas and Tobey Macguire.

Publisher's Summary:
For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end. Homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his life—and also his worst nightmare. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under Landsman's nose. Out of habit, obligation, and a mysterious sense that it somehow offers him a shot at redeeming himself, Landsman begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. Then word comes down that the case is to be dropped. Landsman is having none of it.

My Thoughts:
A murder mystery in a unique setting, complete with an enormous cast of richly drawn characters, made up Yiddish words, and Jewish lore and history. It's a story where the ultra-Orthodox Bobovers turn out to be the bad guys, chess is front and center and the Messiah may have been murdered.

 If you get this on CD, you get Peter Riegert doing a wonderful job with a wide range of voices. Chabon succeeds in creating both a noir thriller and a touching romance and makes for a very satisfying read. Highly recommend.

The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry

The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry
400 pages
Published July 2008 Harper Collins

Synopsis:
Can you read your future in a piece of lace? All of the Whitney women can. But the last time Towner read, it killed her sister and nearly robbed Towner of her own sanity. Vowing never to read lace again, her resolve is tested when faced with the mysterious, unsolvable disappearance of her beloved Great Aunt Eva, Salem's original Lace Reader. Told from opposing and often unreliable perspectives, the story engages the reader's own beliefs. Should we listen to Towner, who may be losing her mind for the second time? Or should we believe John Rafferty, a no nonsense New York detective, who ran away from the city to a simpler place only to find himself inextricably involved in a psychic tug of war with all three generations of Whitney women? Does either have the whole story? Or does the truth lie somewhere in the swirling pattern of the lace?

My review: 
The story is told from numerous points of view, primarily Towner's (the veracity of which is questionable given her history of mental illness) and it can get confusing. The story also shifts back and forth in time. There is a lot of detail to keep track of--much of it will come back to bear in the end. The last 50 pages are full of surprises, although the whole thing seems a little implausible and a little bit like an action movie with non-stop action. I enjoyed the book, even though in the end I was working hard to figure out if any of it made sense.

Daphne by Justine Picardie

Daphne by Justine Picardie
399 pgs
Published August 2008

From the dust jacket: It is 1957. The author, Daphne du Maurier, despairs as her marriage falls apart. Restlessly roaming through Menabilly, her remote mansion by the sea, she is haunted by regret and by her own creations. Seeking distraction , Daphne becomes passionately interested in Branwell, the reprobate brother of the Bronte sisters, and begins a correspondence with the enigmatic scholar Alex Symington. But behind Symington's respectable surface is a slippery character with much to hide. In present day London, a young woman, newly married to a man considerably older than her, struggles with her PhD thesis on du Maurier and the Brontes. Her husband, still seemingly in thrall to his brilliant first wife, is frequently distant and mysterious. Retreating into the comfort of her library, she becomes absorbed in a fifty-year-old literary mystery...

This is really three stories intertwined into one. As a lover of du Maurier and the Brontes, I really enjoyed the insights this book offered. The story of the young woman was not terribly original, borrowing from the plot line of du Maurier's "Rebecca," but I did enjoy the outcome of that story. The story of du Maurier's own torments could become repetitive and overlong, but hers was a fascinating life and it would be hard to make it something reader's wouldn't be interested in. Symington's story was totally new to me and I enjoyed the interaction between Daphne and Alex as their feelings about each other changed throughout the novel. On top of all this, toss in the fact that Daphne's cousins were the young men for whom J. M. Barrie wrote Peter Pan, and the fact that her father was the first person to perform the roles of both Captain Hook and Mr. Darling, and the book is an even more compelling read. Very well researched and well written, this book pulls the reader along throughout.