Book Review: The Magician's Assistant

I don't know how I missed this Ann Patchett novel. Bel Canto was amazing and State of Wonder was astounding. (I must admit I don't remember Run even after reading my review of it, so that novel must not have made a huge impression on me.) The Magician's Assistant is just delicious. I nearly decided not to read it because magicians are so foreign to me. I have never been mesmerized by their kind of magic. But I'm such a fan of Ann Patchett, and so I began.

Sabine is newly widowed, or more importantly, newly alone and without her best friend of 22 years. The magician Parsifal was her husband by name only. He married Sabine, his assistant, after his partner Phan died solely to provide her with his tremendous inheritance. Parsifal's sudden death throws Sabine into shock and depression. She's alone in a mansion with the memory of a lifetime with Parsifal, and all she wants to do is sleep. But the funeral is barely over when her lawyer reveals to her another shock: Parsifal the magician was indeed a master of deception.

Sabine discovers that Parsifal, her elegant and polished magician who claimed to have been orphaned as a child, was a farm boy named Guy from Nebraska with a living family. Sabine is certain that his family must be cretins for him to have completely erased their existence. When she meets his mother and youngest sister, however, she realizes that they adored Parsifal/Guy. She leaves the comforts of California for Nebraska in the winter, to bask in the adoration of Parsifal's family—including another sister and two nephews— and find out why he left them all behind.

Ann Patchett is a beautiful writer. Her sentences are constructed like the most delicious desserts, to be savored and lingered upon. And what a storyteller! Every character, even the manager of Parsifal's store, is clearly depicted and richly drawn. I can still see even that minor character and smell the rugs at the store. Phan and Parsifal reveal specific information to Sabine often in dreams, adding an Isabel Allende-like magical realism quality to the novel. I don't usually love this kind of thing, probably mostly because no one ever comes to me and reveals vital information in dreams, but it completely works in this novel.

Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Keeper of Secrets

I read this book a few weeks ago and remember it well, but not because of the title. Sometimes a title just doesn't fit a book, and this is one of those times.

But I digress, and I haven't even started. I liked this book by Julie Thomas, in spite of the title that I could never remember. (Maybe that has something to do with reading Kate Morton's The Secret Keeper earlier this year.) The story follows a 1742 Guarneri del Gesú violin as it is passed—and stolen—from person to person across several generations.

It begins in 1942 with the Horowitz family, a wealthy, cultured Jewish family of gifted musicians. Everything changes for them on Krystallnacht, when all of the family's possessions are confiscated by the Nazis. The family members are sent to concentration camps. Simon, the second son, survives Dachau only because of he is a gifted musician and is forced to play for the guards.

The violin's next life is with a Russian family, who deceptively procured the violin through the horrors of war. Sergei Valentino's beloved aunt believes her father when he tells her that he bought the Guarneri del Gesú, and it is passed on to Sergei when she is murdered. (That's another story line.) Sergei ultimately becomes a billionaire and a great patron of the arts.

Eventually the owners of the violin meet up in the present time, when 14-year-old violin virtuoso Daniel Horowitz decides he'd rather play baseball than the violin. While the stories of Simon Horowitz in Germany and the Valentinos in Russia were superb and positively riveting, this whole plot line was weak. The revealing of the violin's true ownership was confusing and way too complicated. Daniel was a fairly well-defined character, but his interaction with his mother was just silly. And the whole refusing to play violin because he wanted to play backyard baseball was silly, too. I would have liked the novel better without the intrusion of Daniel's story, or with Daniel's story being as compelling as that of the other sections.

That said, I really liked this novel. The Dachau section itself was amazing, even more so for me because my oldest son actually visited Dachau as I was reading the novel. It was terribly sobering to see his pictures of Dachau as I read Simon's story. The author's research on the violin's history was also excellent. Recommended—but be prepared to be annoyed with the contemporary story.

Book Review: Ender's Game

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card was our book club choice for December's discussion. Not only was it one of our member's favorite all-time books as a young adult, but we like to do the book-to-movie thing as a group every now and then.

Ender's Game isn't our typical book club read, and that was kind of the point. We are making a deliberate effort to read books this year in each member's favorite genre. I'm not generally a sci-fi, fantasy, horror, detective, or even mystery reader; however, it is an excellent challenge to branch out occasionally and retry a genre.

Unfortunately, few of our members ended up reading the novel. Word got around that it was filled with violent children, and that was enough to send half the members scurrying away. Who wants to read about six-year-olds beating each other senseless? I admit I began as a reluctant reader, but I quickly got sucked into the story.

First, don't let the violent children scare you away. It is immediately obvious that these are not normal kids nor is this the Earth we know. This is a world in which children are bred to be geniuses and soldiers. It is their responsibility to save Earth from the hostile aliens, known as the Buggers.

Ender is chosen, but his brother Peter, who is nearly as brilliant, is not. Ender, though a fierce soldier, has a compassionate side, but Peter is cruel and psychotic. Ender is the absolute cream of the crop, and he is recruited at age 6 to begin the intense training that will turn him from boy to military commander. While he knows he was born for this, Ender must leave his parents and his beloved sister, Valentine, who is the one person that knows him completely and adores him.

Most of the novel goes through Ender's military training at Battle School, which I found surprising engrossing. Again, this is really not my kind of a book, but I loved it. Ender is a sweet, brilliant boy who basically always makes good decisions. You just can't help but root for him.

I am not sure this was the best book club choice since half (or fewer) of the members actually read it; however, I am really glad that I stepped outside my usual genre for this. And I really can't wait to see the movie!

Book Review: The Taste of Apple Seeds

I absolutely love the title and the cover of Katharina Hagena's The Taste of Apple Seeds, which spent two years as a bestseller in Germany and was recently translated into English. As an orchardist's daughter, I well know the taste of apple seeds: bitter and woody, a disappointing end that should be spit out. I'd like to say I could make an analogy to a character in the book, but I didn't quite get there.

The story focuses on three generations of women: Iris and her cousin, Iris's mother and her sisters, and Iris's grandmother and her sister. Unfortunately, I kept getting the names mixed up. Had the author used the terms "Grandmother" and "Mom" and "Aunt So-and-So," I would have been able to follow the story better. As it was, I had to keep flipping back to figure out the placement of Anna, Bertha, Christa, Inga and Harriet. That, no doubt, is my own fault as a reader who falls asleep after 15 minutes, night after night. But still, it is distracting and takes away from the fluidity of the novel.

Iris, as the sole survivor of the third generation and heiress of her grandmother's estate, is the collector of family stories. Anna, Bertha, Christa, Inga and Harriet all had stories that Iris needed to discover and tell. Anna and Bertha loved the same man; Inga sparks, literally; Christa misses home; and Harriet's beloved daughter, Iris's cousin, dies in an accident I never quite understood. The stories were all interesting, although told in a confusing fashion. I was left with many questions, a sense of being unfulfilled by the vignettes. (Again, that could be my lack of proper concentration.)

But I really liked the story of Iris and Max, a childhood friend with whom she reunites. I love that Iris dressed in all the old dresses and rode her bike around town. I liked that she was clumsy and unsure of herself.  But I found some things so perplexing that I got hung up on them. Like why, for example, Iris loves to swim in the lake in one paragraph ("I always felt secure when I swam") and yet was terrified of what was under the water in another ("I was afraid of the dead stretching out their soft white hands to me, huge pikes that might be swimming under me, places where the water suddenly turned very cold")? Those kinds of contradictions in character confuse me.

I'm not giving a rousing recommendation, I know. I actually liked the novel. The stories of the women were all intriguing and unique. I just had trouble following them. Perhaps I am too orderly and lack proper concentration skills.

Book Review: Ghost on Black Mountain

Ann Hite's Ghost on Black Mountain was our book club pick for October. Our book club usually runs 25% discussion about the book and 75% general chatting about other things, but Ghost on Black Mountain generated quite a lot of book talk. And, amazingly, for we are a diverse group of readers, we all loved the novel.

The novel begins with Nellie, a 17-year-old Appalachian girl who falls in love with the wrong guy, Hobbs Pritchard. He sweeps her away from her mother and the only home she's ever known and takes her way up the mountain. She quickly discovers that he is Black Mountain's resident tyrant, hated and feared by everyone. Left alone in their big house while Hobbs goes off to do his dirty work, Nellie begins encountering ghosts who seem to want to warn her, not harm her.

Nellie is a sweet, likeable girl married to pure evil; fortunately, the people on Black Mountain, although suspicious of her at first, realize this and rally around her eventually. But I can't reveal any of that part of the story without spoilers.

The second part of the book is told from various POVs, including Nellie's mother and Hobbs's girlfriend. Nellie comes back at the end to tell the rest of her story—and her daughter's story. The novel is filled with all kinds of twists, sprinklings of Appalachian folklore and traditions, rich characters, and lyrical storytelling.

With this novel, Ann Hite joins Amy Greene (Bloodroot) and Sharyn McCrumb (She Walks These Hills) as a distinctive Appalachian voice, one who can flawlessly weave together ghosts, folklore, and everyday characters in a book that the reader just doesn't want to put down. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Nowhere but Home

I loved Liza Palmer's Conversations with the Fat Girl and liked her More Like Her, so I was excited to get a chance to review Nowhere but Home (published by William Morrow 2013).  I like coming home tales, ones that challenge the "you can't go home again" conversation.

In this novel, Texan-turned-Yankee Queenie Wake is fired from her chef's job once again, and she finally admits a sort of defeat and heads back to her tiny Texas town. She's the daughter of the town's deceased tramp, who bestowed upon her the unfortunate name, Queen Elizabeth. She and her sister—the mother of the town's quarterback— have always been considered the city's trash. But she's been gone for a decade, and Queenie realizes that she doesn't have to accept that title anymore.

The novel takes a fascinating twist as Queenie accepts a job at the local prison, cooking last meals for death-row inmates. I found this part of the novel particularly intriguing. I never considered that this  is actually a job, and yet it must be fulfilled. I appreciated Palmer's thoughtful and insightful treatment of both Queenie, the inmates, and the prison staff.

Besides the coming-home theme and the wonderful look into last meals, Palmer includes a satisfying romance. As one might predict, the daughter of the town tramp and the son of the town's richest family once had a secret and powerful romance.  The are bound to meet up again, and their story unfolds bit by bit.

I think what I loved the most about this novel, besides the death-row parts, was the unraveling of all of Queenie's assumptions. She realizes in the course of the novel that she didn't always know the whole story and that many of her decisions and choices were based on only partial information. This is generally true for all of us, of course, but I enjoyed watching a character have "a-ha!" moments, moments of redemption.

Palmer is funny, insightful, and a great writer of dialogue. Highly recommended!

Book Review: Autobiography of Us

This debut novel by Aria Beth Sloss tells the story of a lifelong friendship that probably should have been ditched in college. One friend is independent, the other is clingy and needy. The setting: California in the 1960s, and, yes, it is just as stereotypical as all those 60s images floating in your head right now. I believe the main character even hangs out in Haight-Ashbury at some point in the novel.

But still, I read the whole novel, and I have gotten to the point in my life that I will toss aside novels that feel like a complete waste of time. Sloss writes well, but she tried to cram way too much into this novel. The characters were really quite defined in themselves, but their relationships were not clear. Why were these women even friends ever? She skipped over that whole part mostly. I needed their friendship to have a more solid foundation in order to justify such a relationship that one's whole life revolves around. The motivations were unclear. I ended the novel feeling like I missed something—the essence of the story was lost. Everyone was just too depressing and resigned without any clear reasons. I want some kind of resolution in a novel, some redeeming quality. 

I always feel apologetic when I give a negative review, so let me end on a positive note: Aria Beth Sloss has it in her to write a fantastic novel, and even now she's published a novel that a lot of people really like, according to the amazon reviews.