by Pat Gray on May 27, 2009
Beginning with “Open Season” in 2001, C. J. Box has published 11 books. Seven of them star Wyoming Game Warden Joe Picket, an introspective and gentle man who works to make his wife and daughters a good life on the meager salary his job commands. The Wyoming setting is well-realized, and anyone who has spend time in the Rockies will recognize the landscape. Box’s themes are serious and his characters grapple with life’s challenges. Still, these are great escapes and good for packing in the suitcase as you head for the beach or the mountains. Box’s later stand-along titles, while more in the thriller vein, are still well-written and plotted. Any of his books will grab and hold your attention.
by Pat Gray on May 7, 2009
War and famine and slavery as they come to us in newspaper headlines are troubling events that we puzzle over or analyze or ignore, and often soon forget. When a novelist like Eggers brings us such events in vivid description and detail through the experience of a given individual, a boy on the verge of manhood, we remember. 
I almost skipped reviewing this book here, just because I’m so far behind the curve in reading it. And then I realized that other people may have, like me, missed this one when if first came out at the end of 2006, and may, like me, be grateful to find this amazing novel.
The book is the slightly fictionalized account of the journey of Valentino Achek Deng (actual name), a young refugee whose village was destroyed in the Sudanese Civil War. Deng was one of the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” tens of thousands of boys who walked from villages in southern Sudan to Ethiopia and Kenya for refugee in the wake of fighting and famine. They lost their homes and families, their childhoods, their trust in the world. Having once read this novel, one knows the magnitude of this horror, and the headlines take on new meaning.
But I don’t recommend the book only because it brings world events vividly alive. This is also a wonderfully realized novel, with a protagonist whose observations and understanding are unique and whose longings for his dead family, observations on the behavior of hungry lions in the wild, and musings on the behavior of Americans (as the novel begins, he is working and living in Atlanta) light the novel’s dark events with comic wit and compassion. Deng in fact does not belabor his suffering but reaches constantly for life and human relationship. Eggers has done an amazing job of creating a novel that is true to events but also a full artistic creation. Give this book a try and share it with your friends.
by Pat Gray on May 3, 2009
How do you imagine Paris? I think of the city of lovers, sophisticated women dressed with style, bridges over the Seine, the Louvre, artists sipping wine, writers gathered at coffee houses, and so on. All those may be available a few blocks away, but the fascinating characters in Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog could be living in any city. Locked in by loss, disappointment, and deeply-held cynicism, Renee Michel and Paloma Josse keep themselves apart from the world, observing others with wry, intellectual criticism.
Renee is the middle-aged concierge of an elegant Paris apartment house. She has adopted an intentionally exaggerated version of the stereotypical dress, demeanor, and behavior of a concierge, but behind that mask she is intelligent and educated. She disdains the self-important behavior of most of the tenants, but she is also sympathetic to those who are lonely or suffering. Paloma Josse is the 12-year-old daughter of wealthy parents, residents of the same apartment building. Like Renee, Paloma is far more intelligent than the people around her realize, but she also hides her thoughts and feelings behind a mask.
The novel is narrated by these two characters (who know each other only superficially). It is cleverly written and full of philosophical and intellectual musings. I’ve made the book sound very serious, and it is, but it is also laced with comic scenes and quirky characters. Not in the least plot-driven, it is meditative and inward-searching. I am really amazed (but delighted) by how popular it is, and I thoroughly recommend it to any who enjoy well-written novels with good character development. Not for the impatient, Hedgehog is indeed a rare treat nonetheless.
by Pat Gray on April 20, 2009
I read Geraldine Brooks’s three historical novels in reverse order–the most recent, People of the Book last–and given the way Brooks likes to scramble the chronology of her books, she would probably think that was just fine.
Brooks uses the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated manuscript of mysterious origin that has survived several potential destructions, as the inspiration for People of the Book, in which Australian archivist Hanna 
Heath is tapped to restore the manuscript in Sarajevo in 1996. Hanna is both scientific and intuitive in her approach to restoration, and as she examine the mansucript, she reveals and intuits layer after layer of its long history, a series of escapes of near-destruction during several of humankind’s more violent upheavals and conflicts. Critical moments of the book’s history take place in 1940 Sarajevo, late 19th Century Vienna, 15th Century Venice, Spain during the Inquisition, and 1480 Seville. Hanna is an appealing character, an independent and intelligent woman who is deeply committed to the work she does. During the course of the novel, she explores her personal history in parallel to the steps of studying this extraordinary manuscript, and the constant juxtaposition of past and present keeps the narrative engrossing.
Brooks’s second novel, March, is the story of Mr. March, the father whose absence is a central issue in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. March is a Unitarian abolitionist and pacifist who serves in the Union army as a chaplain. Before the War, he and 
his wife, Marmee, use a hidden room in their home in Concord as stop on the Underground Railroad. The events leading into the Civil War, some of the conditions and experiences of the War, and particularly the intellectual climate of New England in the mid 19th Century are wonderfully realized here. Apparently for some readers, March’s intense idealism and naivete are irritating, but I found him wonderfully appropriate to Alcott’s novel and the Transcendentalist movement of the time. It is, of course, the challenge of the historical novelist to recreate not only the nature of a particular time and place, but also the consciousness that would be a possible and even plausible human experience of that time and place, and while March would be harder to believe in the world of the 21st Century, he seems to me quite plausible and even endearing in his 19th Century Bostonian passionate distaste for human slavery and violence. I was inspired to re-read some Thoreau and Emerson after finishing the novel and to read about the Utopian experiment of Brook Farm. Brooks does an extraordinary job in each of her three novels of gathering together details of geography, people, events, and the texture and smell of life.
Year of Wonders was Brooks’s first novel, set in the village of Eyam, “the plague village,” in England in 1666. Narrated by Anna Firth, a young woman who suffers the loss of her husband and children to this bloody and painful death and then becomes the maid to the village minister and his wife. 
Again, Brooks’s detailed research and the wealth of information she weaves into this riveting novel are notable. She describes in sensual detail the life of the farmers and miners before and during the year of the plague and creates a set of characters whose challenges, conflicts, failures, and sacrifices are both particular to this time and place and reflective of that which is common to human experience past and present.
These are novels for those who enjoy sensual, descriptive prose and complex characters and conflicts as well as those who love well-researched historical fiction. If, like me, you managed to miss them as they were published, rush to the Library for one today! I can’t wait to see what Geraldine Brooks writes next.
