Vesta Kowalski
The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling
~This is about as far from Harry Potter as it is possible to get. It’s hard to find a likeable character among the many (all just slightly overdrawn) whose stories are followed, but the cumulative effect is to immerse the reader in the gritty reality of the lives behind the ever-present statistics of poverty, welfare and drug abuse. Although the setting begins with a peculiarly English situation, it requires no great leap to see our own culture reflected here, and to hear the cry of help from an author whose own life began in similar circumstances.~
From Publisher’s Weekly, Sep 27, 2012
“On the face of it, Rowling’s first adult book is very different from the Harry Potter books that made her rich and famous. It’s resolutely unmagical: the closest thing to wizardry is the ability to hack into the amateurish Pagford Parish Council Web site. Instead of a battle for worldwide domination, there’s a fight over a suddenly empty seat on that Council, the vacancy of the title. Yet despite the lack of invisibility cloaks and pensieves, Pagford isn’t so different from Harry’s world. There’s a massive divide between the haves and the have-nots—the residents of the Fields, the council flats that some want to push off onto a neighboring county council. When Councilor Barry Fairbrother—born in Fields but now a middle-class Pagforder—dies suddenly, the fight gets uglier. In tiny Pagford, and at its school, which caters to rich and poor alike, everyone is connected: obstreperous teenager Krystal Weedon, the sole functioning member of her working-class family, hooks up with the middle-class son of her guidance counselor; the social worker watching over Krystal’s drug-addled mother dates the law partner of the son of the dead man’s fiercest Council rival; Krystal’s great-grandmother’s doctor was Fairbrother’s closest ally; the daughters of the doctor and the social worker work together, along with the best friend of Krystal’s hookup; and so on. Rowling is relentlessly competent: all these people and their hatreds and hopes are established and mixed together. Secrets are revealed, relationships twist and break, and the book rolls toward its awful, logical climax with aplomb. As in the Harry Potter books, children make mistakes and join together with a common cause, accompanied here by adults, some malicious, some trying yet failing. Minus the magic, though, good and evil are depressingly human, and while the characters are all well drawn and believable, they aren’t much fun.”
Read A Likes:
An awfully big adventure, Beryl Bainbridge
Something Happenned, Joseph Heller
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
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Lisa Taplin Murray
The Invisibles by Hugh Sheehy
~There’s nothing I enjoy more than character driven short stories. Yes these stories are dark, many deal with murder, crime or a mystery, but it is through these plot devices that the inner world of the characters shine through.~
From Goodreads:
“Though Hugh Sheehy’s often tragic, sometimes gruesome stories feature bloodied knives and mysterious disappearances, at the heart of these thoughtful thrillers are finely crafted character studies of people who wrestle with the darker aspects of human nature—grief, violence, loneliness, and the thoughts of crazed minds.
Sheehy’s stories shine a spotlight on the bleak fringes of America, giving voice to the invisibles who need it most. A dismal assistant teacher spiking her coffee after school is suddenly locked in a basement with a student who has just witnessed his father’s murder. A seventeen-year-old girl at a skate rink whose name no one can remember is motherless, friendless, and sure she will be the next to go. The heartbroken victim of a miscarriage dreams of her fetus’s voyage through the earth’s plumbing. The estranged addict son, certain of his innate goodness, loses himself in a blizzard and fails his family again. Sheehy’s characters learn that however invisible they may feel and whatever their intentions, their actions incur a cost both to themselves and those around them. They struggle to tame or come to terms with the forces they meet—the tragedies—that are far larger than their small existences. In this debut, Sheehy illuminates the all-but-silent note of adult loneliness and how we cope with it or, perhaps, just move past it”
Read A Likes:
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Lisa Taplin Murray
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
~I really enjoyed Patchett’s Bel Canto but wasn’t so crazy about her 2008 Run so I thought I’d give State of Wonder a try after hearing great things about it from our patrons. I was quite entranced by the two main characters, a scientist for a drug company, Marina, and her former mentor and researcher gone rogue in the Brazilian jungle, Dr. Swenson. I was struck by the illusions to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, one of my all-time favorite books, but Patchett was able to twist the story off that path and into her own world. Patchett writes great characters and while I would say her writing edges on philosophical literary fiction, this book skims that surface without getting too heavy. Questions of medical ethics, cultural sensitivity, aging and womanhood, as well as the many facets of love and friendship are all brewing in State of Wonder.~
From Publisher’s Weekly, 4/4/2011
“Patchett is a master storyteller who has an entertaining habit of dropping ordinary people into extraordinary and exotic circumstances to see what they’re made of. In this expansive page-turner, Marina Singh, a big pharma researcher, is sent by her married boss/lover to the deepest, darkest corner of the Amazon to investigate the death of her colleague, Anders Eckman, who had been dispatched to check on the progress of the incommunicado Dr. Annick Swenson, a rogue scientist on the cusp of developing a fertility drug that could rock the medical profession (and reap enormous profits). After arriving in Manaus, Marina travels into her own heart of darkness, finding Dr. Swenson’s camp among the Lakashi, a gentle but enigmatic tribe whose women go on bearing children until the end of their lives. As Marina settles in, she goes native, losing everything she had held on to so dearly in her prescribed Midwestern life, shedding clothing, technology, old loves, and modern medicine in order to find herself. Patchett’s fluid prose dissolves in the suspense of this out-there adventure, a juggernaut of a trip to the crossroads of science, ethics, and commerce that readers will hate to see end.”
Read A Likes:
An Obvious Enchantment, Tucker Malarkey
The Tattoo Artist, Jill Ciment
The White Mary, Kira Salak
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Kate Pickup-McMullin
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt
~A fun western rolic with strong characters. Very classic storytelling style.~
From Publisher’s Weekly,1/10/2011
“Dewitt’s bang-up second novel (after Ablutions) is a quirky and stylish revisionist western. When a frontier baron known as the Commodore orders Charlie and Eli Sisters, his hired gunslingers, to track down and kill a prospector named Herman Kermit Warm, the brothers journey from Oregon to San Francisco, and eventually to Warm’s claim in the Sierra foothills, running into a witch, a bear, a dead Indian, a parlor of drunken floozies, and a gang of murderous fur trappers. Eli’s deadpan narration is at times strangely funny (as when he discovers dental hygiene, thanks to a frontier dentist dispensing free samples of “tooth powder that produced a minty foam”) but maintains the power to stir heartbreak, as with Eli’s infatuation with a consumptive hotel bookkeeper. As more of the brothers’ story is teased out, Charlie and Eli explore the human implications of many of the clichés of the old west and come off looking less and less like killers and more like traumatized young men. With nods to Charles Portis and Frank Norris, DeWitt has produced a genre-bending frontier saga that is exciting, funny, and, perhaps unexpectedly, moving.”
Read A Likes:
The Hawkline Monster, Richard Brautigan
True Grit, Charles Portis
Welcome to Hard Times, E. L. Doctorow
God’s Country, Percival L. Everett
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Candy Emlen
Defending Jacob by William Landay
~I really liked it; the writing is solid and the story gave me a lot to think about.~
Vesta Kowalski
Susan Plimpton