The Orphan Master's Son

 Holy cow was this a tough one. If it had not been a book for my book group, I am not sure I would have finished it. This novel by Adam Johnson, which won the 2013 Pulitzer for fiction, is an absolutely harrowing journey into the lives of people living in North Korea during the tenure of Kim Jong Il. The perspective is predominantly that of Jun Do (an allusion to John Doe?) who is raised in an orphanage run by his father. His journey through the crazy machinations of politics has him initially kidnapping people from Japan or S. Korea and returning them to N. Korea, being part of a mission to the United States to retrieve something the Dear Leader says was stolen from him, and  finally being put on a fishing boat to monitor radio communications from other countries. When Jun Do becomes part of a cover-up for a fellow crewman's defection, he eventually finds himself in one of the notorious mining prisons, from which people never return. But fate plays an ironic twist when he encounters General Ga, who has come to torture Jun Do but gets killed instead. Jun Do puts on his uniform and assumes Ga's identity. Everybody in authority knows he is not really General Ga, but reality is what the Dear Leader says it is, and right now he has need for the continued existence of General Ga. So Jun Do, walks out of the prison, returns to the home and family of General Ga, and begins making plans for them all to escape. We also have a storyline from one of the official torturers who begins to see the insanity of the system but not in time to save himself or one of his colleagues.

     This is simply a nightmarish or, as The New York Times calls it, "Kafkaesque" existence where any accusation of disloyalty can end your life. It turns parents and children against one another, or colleague against colleague in order to secure one's own safety. Propaganda is ubiquitous and nobody is truly safe, however. As one character notes, “Where we are from, stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.”
Johnson based his story on actual testimony from N. Korean defectors, although he said he had to tone it down in places because the reality would be too shocking. Adam Johnson is also an English professor at Stanford University; there is a biography from Wikipedia here. Additional reviews from The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Telegraph.

Eagle Catcher

Having recently read a later book (The Girl with Braided Hair) by Margaret Coel set on the Wind River Reservation, I wanted to go back and start the series from the beginning. This book introduces "two intelligent, compassionate sleuths: Father John O'Malley, S.J., a history scholar and recovering alcoholic, exiled to an Indian mission on the Great Plains, and Vicky Holden, an attorney who, after ten years in the outside world, has returned to the reservation to help her people" (from the author's website).
The opening event is the murder of the tribal chairman of the Arapahoes at Wind River, and the immediate suspect is his nephew, Anthony, who was heard arguing with him the previous evening. Vicky takes Anthony's case while she and Father O'Malley undertake to discover who the real killer is. The motivation for the crime involves the early history of the Arapahoes when land was taken from them, and their current efforts to buy back pieces of that land through the profits from their oil (mineral rights). Of course Vicky and John make themselves targets when they start digging into past and present crimes against the tribe. Once again, this is well-written, tightly plotted, and informative, providing insights into historical and present situations and issues facing the Arapaho people. I would not hesitate to read more in the series.

The Girl with Braided Hair

One of the nicest kinds of surprise is when you discover an author, previously unknown to you, who pulls you into their stories, their characters, and their settings. Just by chance, going through the bag of "to be sold" books at my sister-in-law's house, I ran across this book by Margaret Coel. This is the 13th installment (of 16 total) in her series of mysteries based around the Wind River Reservation in central Wyoming. The two protagonists are Vicky Holden, an Indian rights lawyer, and Father John O'Malley, pastor at the St. Francis mission on the reservation.
Father John is called in when the skeleton of a young woman is uncovered; she was apparently murdered in the early 1970's--a time when AIM was active and many of the AIM leaders sought to hide from their federal pursuers on the reservation. Vicky gets involved when a group of tribe elders (women) ask her to move the investigation along so the skeleton can be identified and given a proper burial.  Vickie knows that a 30+ year-old case is not only low priority for law enforcement, but also that people on the reservation will never talk to a white sheriff, so she agrees to help. Pooling their networks and information, Vicky and Father John identify the young woman as Liz Plenty Horses, who apparently had a baby with her just before being murdered. They both want the murderer brought to justice and it quickly becomes apparent that this person is not only still around, but is willing to kill again to keep from being found. Vicky is his initial target, but everyone she talks to also becomes vulnerable. Determined, they forge on and Father John is very nearly killed in the process. The culprit is finally caught, the now-grown daughter of Liz is found, and the dead woman is laid to rest on the reservation.
It is so exciting that there are lots more books in this series to read and I will definitely go back and start from the beginning with The Eagle Catcher, so I can watch these characters and their relationship develop. Oh boy! Coel has been compared to Tony Hillerman in a favorable way and, based on my initial contact, that seems warranted. Good writing and compelling plot line complement the well-developed characters and settings. Positive reviews here from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. 

A Vision of Light

This first installment in the "Margaret of Ashbury" trilogy by Judith Merkle Riley is set in 14th C England, a time when women had no rights and, in fact, were considered less than men in their mental capacities. They were believed to be unable to think logically and it was a radical concept to consider learning to read for any but the most wealthy women. So imagine itinerant monk Brother Gregory's chagrin when the only work he can find is to write the life story of a merchant's wife. Margaret was born near the church of Ashbury and was married off to an elderly merchant when she was only 14. Her younger brother had been taken into the Church to be trained as a cleric; this was considered a stroke of real fortune for such a poor family. Only later does Margaret learn the real reasons behind that decision. But Margaret is physically and sexually abused in her marriage, and when the plague is decimating the population, the couple leave town to avoid contamination. However Margaret, who is pregnant, takes ill and her husband abandons her by the side of the road to die. When Margaret regains consciousness, we learn she has been saved by a mid-wife/ herbalist, Hilde. The baby died, however. Margaret agrees to learn the mid-wife's skills. Her near-death experience has brought her a gift, a vision of light, that allows her to see the life force in every being, to heal the sick, and to occasionally hear God. It is noteworthy that the author has chosen to give Margaret supernatural powers in a time when women had no temporal power.
Joining an acting troupe for a while, then settling finally in London, Margaret is able to start building a clientele of those needing herbal remedies or help with childbirth. When she is called to the bedside of a couple of wealthy patrons, however, jealousies are aroused and she is imprisoned for heresy. She escapes being burned at the stake only through the intervention of her brother, who is in service to the Priest heading the inquisition council. She is forbidden to practice her craft and one of her patients offers to marry her as a solution. The horrors of her earlier marriage make her reluctant, but Master Kendall, also a wealthy merchant, is not only kind and loving, but indulges Margaret's every whim, including agreeing to let her hire a copyist for her biography and to let her learn to read and write. Life seems finally to have smiled on Margaret until Kendall dies, and then a whole new set of problems arise. Again, marriage seems the only solution to having her house stolen out from under her. Certainly intriguing enough to want to read the rest of the trilogy!
Margaret is an admirable character and the historical setting is deftly rendered to create a vivid sense of time and place. Favorable review here from Kirkus.

A Simple Favor

This debut novel by Darcey Bell opens with an aside from one of the 3 main characters. "My mother used to say: Everyone has secrets. That's why you can never really know anyone else. Or trust anyone. It's why you can never know yourself. Sometimes we even keep secrets from ourselves. Growing up, I thought that was good advice...Later I discovered that Mom was speaking from personal experience. And I wonder if she was not just preparing me but programming me for secrecy and mistrust. Did she sense that I would grow up to have darker and more shameful secrets than anyone else's? Secrets I mostly manage to keep--even from myself?"
Stephanie, widowed for 2 years and living with her young son Miles, finds herself feeling lonely and so begins writing a blog for "Moms." What goes into the blog is a slightly altered version of the real Stepanie's life; her blog offers emotional honesty, unequivocal support for the challenges of being a mother, and a mostly sunny take on the world. When she is befriended by glamorous neighbor and mother of her son's best friend, she is thrilled at having found a kindred spirit--she thinks. Emily works as a publicist for a fashion designer in Manhattan, and is married to a handsome British financier on Wall Street. Due to their busy lives, Stephanie occasionally picks up their son, Nicky, and keeps him at her home until Emily or Sean can pick him up. On one particular occasion, when Sean is abroad on a business trip, Emily fails to show up. Stephanie thinks she must have misunderstood, but Emily is not answering her phone. After a couple of days, Stephanie is panicking and gets in touch with Sean, who doesn't initially seem too worried;  eventually, however, she and Sean go to the police, who also are not too worried. People not infrequently walk away from their families, after all. However, several weeks later, a body is discovered in a lake near Emily's old family cabin in Michigan, wearing Emily's ring, and matching Emily's DNA. It seems clear that Emily is dead. As Emily mourns her best friend, Sean mourns his wife, and Nicky struggles with the loss of his mother, the families become entangled. And then Nicky comes home from school one day, claiming to have seen his mother.
Apparently Stephanie did not take fully to heart her mother's advice and she continues to trust even after she learns of betrayal. She will do anything to get her best friend back, including betraying others in turn. You just know this is not going to end well.
A favorable review from Library Journal, and not so favorable reviews (which I share) from Publishers' Weekly and Kirkus.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

I went to hear Katherine Boo as part of our library's "Author! Author!" series and was just bowled over by her levels of compassion, commitment, dedication, and determination. If I had not gone to see and hear her, and if we had not selected this book for our book group read, I am not sure I could have finished this book. It was that hard. Boo had previously reported on some of the most disadvantaged communities in the U. S. winning a Pulitzer prize for her work. But after marrying an east Indian man, she felt she wanted to tell the story of the poor in that country (brief bio of Boo and her translators in the project are here). In spite of signficant health issues, she undertook this research in 2008. Boo spent 4+ years, for months at a time, in a small slum across from the Mumbai (India) airport, getting to know how the poorest people lived. Surrounded by towering luxury hotels, hidden behind billboards advertising flooring that would be "beautiful forever," the half acre of Annawadi was the center of life for over 3,000 human inhabitants, some goats, horses, pigs, and a lake of sewage. People survived by scavenging through garbage for recyclable materials, stealing, selling their bodies. Only a handful had regular jobs, and yet, according to government statistics, these people were not living in poverty. Many had no roof over their heads, never knew when they would eat next, could not rely on any government help, health care providers, or even so-called charities to offer them the most basic kinds of assistance. Not only did the rich prey on the poor, but so did the not so rich and the poor themselves. Boo was determined not to interfere in people's lives in her efforts to truthfully document was their existence was life and how they coped, but that meant she saw people (including children) beaten and sent to jail for crimes they did not commit, witnessed corruption at every level of government and in NGO's, and experienced the deaths of people she knew and had come to care about. It's not clear what separated those who chose to survive at any cost from those who gave up all hope and killed themselves by, for example, eating rat poison. Everyone should read this National Book Award winner, but be prepared for a painful journey.
Some great photos are on this website.
An interview with Boo was done on NPR.
There are numerous excellent reviews: Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Boston Globe, to name just a few.

Gratitude

This short little book is a collection of 4 previously published essays written in the last years of Oliver Sacks' life. Learn more about Oliver Sacks if you aren't familiar with him already. He has written some amazing books (e.g., Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat). Born in England and originally educated at Oxford, he got his medical training at Mt. Zion in San Francisco and at UCLA before moving to New York, where he was a practicing neurologist for 5 decades. Engaged until the very end of his life, his memoir was published just a few weeks before he died in August of 2015. The first essay, "Mercury," was written on the eve of his 80th birthday; mercury is element #80 in the periodic table. He loved the periodic table and had memorability made from appropriate elements commemorating various birthdays. The last 3 essays were written after learning that a rare melanoma had metastasized and would be fatal. He examines what it means to have lived a full life and to be grateful for that life.  From the book:
“My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
A fast read that provides an interlude for thought and is well worth pondering. 

The Outlaw Demon Wails

Obviously a take-off on the title of the old Clint Eastwood movie, The Outlaw Josey Wales, although I am at a loss to explain what connection there might be. Published originally in 2008, this is about the 10th installment in "The Hollows" series (there are about 2 dozen novels and novellas). I have read a couple of Kim Harrison's other books--a prior installment in "The Hollows" series, also a take-off on a Clint Eastwood title, For a Few Demons More; and one in her YA series, Something Deadly This Way Comes-- and really enjoyed them, but was little disappointed in this one and not exactly sure why. I usually love anything with kick-ass paranormal women protagonists, but witch Rachel just did not engage me this time. I like the pixie family, Jenks and brood, that lives in her converted church and graveyard. Rachel's vampire roommate, Ivy, seemed curiously flat as a character.
Rachel and her mom are shopping for enhancements to Rachel's planned Halloween costume--like a bust-enhancing charm--when the store explodes. Having crossed paths with the demon Algaliarept--Al for short--Rachel is shocked that he has escaped demon jail and is not only ready to break his promise not to harm her but is, in fact, out to kill her. She is trying to solve the murder of former boyfriend Kisten, which still torments her, but has to stay out of Al's grasp. She learns a few secrets about her spell casting mom, has a new love interest, etc. There is a more informative plot summary at the Love Vampires web site which has a favorable take on the book, but recommends reading them in order--which I have not done.

Leviathan Wakes

I'm not exactly sure what a "space opera" is supposed to be genre wise, but this is certainly good science fiction from James S. A. Corey (a pseudonym for authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck). Leviathan Awakes was nominated for the 2012 Hugo and Locus awards and is the first installment (a hefty one at just over 560 pages) in "The Expanse" series, which includes six novels, novellas and short stories and has been made into a TV series on SyFy. For a quick overview of the series, see the Wikipedia entry.
In this opening salvo, Humans have colonized Mars and several of the larger asteroids in our solar system, from which they mine minerals. They are also mining ice from the rings of Saturn, but as yet they have not gone further out to other star systems. When the captain of an ice freighter encounters a derelict ship, the Scopuli, the crew is thrust into a seemingly unfathomable scenario. The Scopuli's crew has vanished or been subsumed into an alien presence that will not stop with taking over one ship. In a soon-to-converge parallel storyline, Detective Miller of the Ceres police force on one of the larger asteroids, has been assigned to look for a missing woman, who could be anywhere in the solar system. But this young woman, Julie, comes from big money and the fact that money talks never seems to change. These two men will cross paths when it turns out that the missing Julie was aboard the Scopuli. As the race to find Julie and contain the alien threat go forward, there is also politics at play, with Earth, Mars, and the "Belters" vying for control and someone is using the alien being, Leviathan, to try and shift the balance of power. A civil war is almost inevitable. The characters are reasonably complex and interesting; you feel like you could meet them on the street. The particularities of this expanded human habitation seem feasible and well thought-out. I would definitely read more and will try and track down the TV series, as well. Kirkus and Publishers' Weekly offer fairly positive reviews, and I really thought the Wall Street Journal captured the flavor and grit of the book, so have attached it below (since it is subscription and you might not otherwise get to read it!)

 WSJ In Brief: Science Fiction (review, July 2, 2011)
This is the future the way it was supposed to be. From the Moon we'd step to Mars. Mars would become an industrial center, while the asteroid belt would supply hundreds of mountain-size rocks to be tunneled for habitats and mined for construction material. The gas-giant planets would remain gravitationally impossible for human life, but not their moons.
In James Corey's "Leviathan Wakes" this bustling interplanetary civilization has created a need for tourism centers, and the giant asteroid Ceres is one of them, up to a thousand ships a day docking to use its bars and casinos. "Belters" look different from Earthmen -- tall and skinny from being brought up in low gravity. They think different, too. Monkey with safety and you're out the airlock without a suit.
Mr. Corey's model isn't the now-common cyberpunk style. It's more like "L.A. Confidential" with fusion drives. One of Mr. Corey's two central figures is the tired cop, familiar from crime-noir fiction; the other is an Earthman from Montana, skippering a water-hauler. What he finds on one run, a hijacked spaceship with no survivors, sets off the latent hostility between Earthmen and Belters. But the discovery also suggests that humanity may have come into contact with a larger biosphere, something truly from the stars, something posthuman.
The story rips along, driven by two main characters who don't like each other, each of whom has his own uncompromising morality. Even more compelling than the pace, though, is the sense of possibility. Galactic empires, "Star Trek," "Star Wars": They aren't going to happen. Those futures have faded. This one, imagined in pixel-sharp detail -- it's still there.
Credit: By Tom Shippey

Shadow Catcher

Author James R. Hannibal (pseudomym) is a former Stealth pilot and a graduate of the Air Force Academy where he majored in Middle Eastern studies. So his bona fides for writing military thrillers are solid. What is surprising is that, in addition to writing this "Nick Baron series," he also writes a middle school series called "Section 13" (a list of his books is at Amazon).
The Triple Seven Chase team, led by Air Force major Nick Baron, is initially tasked with destroying a B-2 stealth bomber lying at the bottom of the Persian Gulf before enemies can get their hands on the technology. But then a message  intercepted by the CIA suggests that a solder thought to be dead years ago, may still be alive in China. The team, with a new member on board, must rely on the latest flight technology to rescue him. But this may all be a trap. Solid writing and good plot line. Engrossing read.