The Boys in the Boat

My book group read this while I was in Italy but friend, Anne Zald, had sent it to me and I still wanted to read it. Wow! What a compelling account that made it hard to put down, even though I already knew how it ended. This is an arcing narrative leading to the University of Washington's 8 man crew going to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and, against all odds, winning the gold medal.
Along the way we follow mainly one of the ultimate crew members, Joe Rantz, who came from a tumultuous childhood. Often living in poverty, abandoned by his father and family several times, he nevertheless had the determination to survive, scrape together a living, and put himself through 4 years of engineering school at the UW. And he married his high school sweetheart and raised a family. Really a remarkable man. But then they all were. The training schedule endured by these young men was simply torturous and author, Daniel James Brown, makes the reader feel every freezing, painful, exhilarating moment of those times. I can't recommend this book highly enough. Great story, very competent writing, and inspirational.

A Darker Shade of Magic

Set in London, or in several of them to be more precise, this book by V.E. Schwab is about MAGIC. Kell is one of only two Antari alive who can transport between the worlds of Red, White, and Grey London. Black London may still exist but the doors have all been locked and the access keys destroyed--or at least that was what was supposed to happen. When Magic took a dark turn and began to control people, the other worlds of Red, White, and Grey London isolated Black London to protect themselves. In the intervening centuries, Grey London has stagnated with little trace of magic to be found. Mad King George is on the throne. White London is ruled by whoever can wrest the power of the throne for themselves. At the time the book is set, the rulers are siblings Athos and Astrid Dane, scheming and cruel tyrants who have enslaved their population. Only in Red London, Kell's home, do magic and the people happily co-exist and thrive. But someone has found a talisman from Black London and tricks Kell into bringing it into Red London, opening the doors to attack.
Kell appears to be outmaneuvered and overpowered in trying to get the talisman back to Black London before more harm is done; however, a clever girl thief from Gray London, Lila Bard, returns the favor of Kell saving her life by rescuing him several times over. All Lila ever wanted was to own her own ship and sail the world. Now she has more adventures than she could have wished for or imagined, but she does not hesitate. Together, they might just save the worlds. 
This book reminds me of two others I have read. UnLunDun by China Mieville, also deals with different versions of London that exist in parallel universes. A good read I reviewed years ago for the children's literature database (attached below if you're interested). The other, more recent, is the book in Patricia Briggs' "Sianim" series called When Demons Walk--I have a blog post for this one. This also involves a woman thief who comes to the aid of a magician.

Review of UnLunDun: Twelve-year-old Deeba never imagined where she would end up the night she accompanied her best friend, Zanna, into the basement of the housing complex. But things had been getting stranger and stranger for her friend, with wild animals bowing to her, total strangers greeting her with reverence, and her name showing up in bridge graffiti. With the turn of a wheel Zanna and Deeba are transported to a fantastical world made up of all the things that are broken or discarded by the inhabitants of their former hometown, London; it is the shadow city, unLondon, where none of the rules of their previous lives apply. Animate milk cartons become pets, specially trained rubbish bins are soldiers, double-decker buses fly, words become creatures, and people dress in clothes made from the pages of books. Your best friends may not be fully human, like half-ghost-half-boy Hemi. Although Zanna is the Chosen One described in the prophecy book, the Smog has stolen her memory and it is left to Deeba to save unLondon from being taken over by evil forces. In his first young adult novel, Mieville creates a wildly imaginative setting and story on a par with Terry Pratchett s Discworld series. This hefty work has a serious message about pollution and the mindset of disposability, but it s also a good adventure--with intrepid young male and female protagonists--that will appeal to fantasy fans of both genders. 2007, Del Rey/Ballantine Books/Random House, $17.95. Ages 12 to 18.
(PUBLISHER: Ballantine Books (New York:), PUBLISHED: 2007.)

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

This debut novel by Helen Simonson is next up for my book group and, although I did not feel totally engrossed in the book, I did come to feel a certain fondness for Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), a widower living in the village of Edgecome St. Mary in Sussex. The major has been living alone for several years now; his ambitious and mostly unlikable adult son, Christopher, is in "The City" as an investment banker and seems to think his father is not worth his time. Nevertheless, he and his new American girlfriend, are renting a cottage near the Major to keep an eye on him.
Major Pettigrew's younger brother, Bertie, dies unexpectedly, and he is dealing not only with this new grief, but distress that the mate to a valuable Churchill shotgun may not be returned to him by the widow. The matched set were divided between the two sons when the father died; at the time the father stipulated, verbally, that the guns should be reunited when one or the other of the brothers died. Major Pettigrew wants the gun because it confers prestige, and because he always felt, deep down, that as the oldest son it was rightfully his. On the other hand, Christopher and Bertie's family want to sell the guns to get the money.
Major Pettigrew is comforted in his grief by an unlikely outsider, the widow of a Pakistani shop owner in the village, Mrs. Jasmina Ali. She is smart, beautiful, a good business person, and loves literature. They become friends and would like to become something more. But the village and Ernest's family and friends look down on her because of her color, her religion and her social class. She is sucked back into her brother's family, and even though her husband left the shop to her, it appears it will go to his nephew instead, if the family has its way.
Major Pettigrew has a sharp wit but is on the verge of giving up when sensible Grace--the suitable choice of partner for him--encourages him NOT to settle but to pursue his passion. He drives north, helps Jasmina escape, and in the end, even rescues the seemingly cold-hearted nephew. All ends happily after all.

X

The latest in the Sue Grafton alphabet series. I have read and enjoyed (and own) "A" through "W" so was happy to dive into this. The brevity of the title gives an inkling of the serious nature of the story...usually the titles have a sub-title, e.g., W is for Wasted. Not only is there a worse than usual bad guy, but Kinsey must come to terms with her own prejudices and misjudgements of former acquaintance and work colleague Pete Wolinsky, who was recently murdered. Then there is the elderly couple who have moved in next door and seem to be taking advantage of Henry's good nature--they turn out to be practiced con artists. Kinsey sets out to catch them cheating in a way that will get them into jail. She takes on one of Pete's old cases to make amends to his memory and to his widow, and in the process crosses swords with a violent stalker of women. She also gets dragged into an enraged divorcee's efforts to get even with her philandering husband by stealing some art.
This felt like a rich and satisfying read. Grafton always has a bit more to offer than, for example, Janet Evanovich, in terms of moral quandries and complex characters. I would put her on the spectrum somewhere between Evanovich and Sara Paretsky--some quirky fun, but also serious issues.

The Marriage of Opposites

This is the newest of Alice Hoffman's novels, which tells the story of Rachel Pomié, the woman who was to become the mother of Impressionist painter Camille Pizzarro. She grew up in a Jewish family on the island of St. Thomas, when it was still a territory of Denmark (early 1800's). The Jews had been driven from one place to another and so could not be blamed for feeling that this sanctuary under Danish rule was precarious and that should do their best not to draw any undue or negative attention to themselves. This led to a strictly proscribed life, however. Women had no rights, children should obey their parents and follow in their parents' footsteps whenever possible, and no one must marry outside their religion, much less outside their race.
This is a tale filled with forbidden loves. When Rachel's infant brother dies of a fever, her mother takes in a baby boy and raises him as her son and favored child. Only much later do we learn who Aaron really is. Aaron and Rachel's best friend, Jestine, fall in love but are forbidden to marry because Jestine is the daughter of the Pomié's African maid, Adelle. Before Aaron is sent away to France to work in the family business there, Jestine becomes pregnant. When Aaron eventually returns with a French wife, they kidnap his daughter and Jestine does not see her again for decades.
Rachel is married off to a much older man, a widower with three children, to help her father's business ( shipping and trading) stay solvent. She never comes to love Monsieur Petit, but he is kind and they have several children together before he dies in his 50's. A handsome young nephew,  Frédéric Pizzarro, comes from Paris to run the family business, and now Rachel falls passionately in love. Of course she is forbidden to marry because he is family, but they nevertheless become lovers and eventually have children together, including Jacob Abraham Camille. They continue to petition their community for acceptance of their marriage, which comes only much later, after years of social exile that profoundly affect the family. 
There is a  lot of story here, but perhaps more compelling is the abundance of character and atmosphere. Rachel dreams of escaping St. Thomas and going to Paris and both of these locales are described in evocative images. The prose is lush and wraps you in feelings, place and dreams. You understand what it feels like to be constrained by custom and to yearn for more--and then to carry those constraints with you even after you have escaped. I have read other books by Hoffman, and, although I am not a big fan of magical realism, this one really got under my skin.
More reviews: Kirkus, NPR, The New York Times 

Working Stiff

The sub-title of this book by Dr. Judy Melinek and her husband T.J. Mitchell is "Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner." I read a blurb about this book in a book catalog and, rather than buy it, I checked it out of the library and found it sufficiently engrossing to read the whole thing. Although she started a surgery residency after completing medical school, Melinek soon came to believe that the conditions of the residency threatened the health of both patients and residents and she switched to forensic pathology. She did her residency at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City. This is considered one of the very best residency programs in the field and she felt it offered her the opportunity to continually learn more about the human body and how it functions or fails to function.
She tells a series of vignettes about the cases she work on, including discussions of various ways that the families of the deceased deal with their deaths. Homicides were not a large percentage of her cases, but she did help convict a number of killers through thorough work and documentation. On the other hand, she felt some people got away with murder because assumptions were made about the victims' life styles or because the police were unwilling to investigate.  Since her father committed suicide when she was a teen, she felt a particular empathy with the families in those cases. She even had a stalker--a mother who could not accept that her son had died of a drug overdose and wanted the death certificate change to indicate his death was due to accident or homicide.
Melinek was in the middle of her residency when 9/11 occurred and she documents in detail what the process was like to deal with the remains of nearly 3,000 victims. Within a month of that disaster, a plane crash in Queens killed almost 300 people, further straining an already overloaded system. She speaks highly of the professionalism, expertise and compassion of her co-workers.
A really interesting read, presented in a sympathetic and totally non-sensationalistic manner. Technical terminology is usually explained pretty clearly. Appeals to our morbid fascination with death. Reviews available from The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Kirkus.  

The Job

This is another installment in the "Fox and O'Hare" series by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg.  Master thief Nicolas Fox, having finally been caught by FBI special agent Kate O'Hare, is now more or less working with the FBI to stop other bad guys. When a series of museums thefts seem to lead right back to Fox, Kate is brought in to track him down--again. But she doesn't think he would be so careless as to leave fingerprints or let his face be caught on a security monitor and he, in fact, denies being the thief. Clearly someone wants his attention, however, and when Kate catches the actual thief, a former accomplice of Fox's, they decide to go after the man she was trying to trap, the man who murdered her brother. Menendez is also the head of a major global drug ring; the problem is, no one knows what he looks like since he had extensive plastic surgery, so an elaborate trap is laid, targeted to his known weaknesses. An elaborate scam is conceived and carried out to make Menendez think a couple of clever but resource poor archaeologists have discovered the sunken wreck of the Santa Isabela, which carried hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold. Kate gets to spend time as a hostage with Menendez' sadistic bodyguard girlfriend while Fox and crew take Menendez on a make-believe ride to the site of the wreck--all accomplished with virtual reality and special effects. Light and entertaining reading when you just want something fun--there is a fair amount of sexual banter between Fox and O'Hare. Evanovich is a very competent writer and the characters are engaging. O'Hare is a strong female protagonist.

The Light of the World

This book by Elizabeth Alexander was one I read because I thought my friend, Joan* had recommended it. Turns out she told me she could NOT read it. But it was too late. I cried and I sighed and my heart broke and soared. It is a book about loss, specifically the death of her husband from a heart attack when he was barely 50 years old. He was a refugee from the wars in Eritrea, but embraced life with a fervor that perhaps sought to balance out the trauma he had endured.
So it is also a book about love and living life to the fullest. Not many of us will have a love or a marriage like Elizabeth and Ficre, but if we have loved at all, then we know that loss is the inevitable flip side of the coin. Whether or not this is a loss you have experienced personally, much will resonate as she describes her --and her sons'-- struggle to cope with life after Ficre.
Alexander is a poetry professor at Yale so it is not surprising that her writing is rich in sensory image, emotion and recollection. She read one of her poems at Obama's 2009 inauguration. Well worth reading. Much more comprehensive review here from the NYTimes and this much briefer but touching one from Kirkus.