October

A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell.
           It’s been almost a decade since Mary Doria Russell’s first novel The Sparrow was published, and seven years since its sequel Children of God appeared. Her patient fans will discover that her newest book – so long in coming – was well worth the wait. A Thread of Grace takes place in northern Italy during the last years of World War II and explores themes Russell initially developed in her earlier novels – the randomness of man’s fate; the fear of “the other” in our lives; the enduring and powerful presence of evil in the world; and most importantly, perhaps, the question of how one can believe in a God who allows such horrors as the Holocaust to occur. Russell introduces us to a large cast of characters, Jews and Christians alike, who are faced with difficult – often life and death – choices during wartime. This is an incredibly affecting, terrifying, sad, and at the same time, a hopeful novel. As I read it, I was constantly torn between wanting to find out what happened to these men and women and children I had grown to care about (so I kept wanting to turn the pages faster and faster), but at the same time not wanting to read any further because I couldn’t bear the thought of their deaths (so I kept putting the book down or turning the pages slower and slower). This is one of those wonderful novels that you just don’t want to miss.

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate diCamillo.
          I’ve included this title in my new book Book Crush (due out in the spring of 2007) in a category called “Dolls and Dollhouses,” knowing full well that the main character, Edward Tulane, would argue that he is not a doll at all. And he’d be right. But I couldn’t think of where else to put this moving novel about the power of love to transform even a most proper (not to say full-of-self-pride) three-foot tall rabbit. Edward lived a serene (not to say boring) and most self-important life under the care of a little girl named Abilene, until the unforeseen and unthinkable happens, and he’s unwillingly set on a challenging series of adventures, none of which he’s prepared for, and, especially at the beginning, none of which he welcomes. DiCamillo (who won the Newbery Award for The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread) has crafted a purely wonderful reading experience for 6- to 12-year-olds.

To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry by Will Blythe.
          Having experienced both the joy and heartbreak of years of football games featuring the University of Michigan (my alma mater) versus Ohio State, I thought I knew what sports rivalries were like. I never want to see Michigan lose, especially to the Buckeyes. But after reading To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever, I have to agree with author Will Blythe that the enmity between the Blue Devils and the Tar Heels is at another level altogether. As Blythe follows his beloved UNC team through the 2005 season, he interviews players, fans, coaches, and sportswriters in an attempt to explain the gulf that
separates these schools located a mere 8 miles apart as the crow flies but a gazillion miles apart in psychological distance. But this is also a loving tribute to his father and mother; it’s about returning home to the place where you began and, as T.S. Eliot says, knowing it for the first time. Blythe’s writing is up tempo and there are enough interesting (quirky?) people here that you don’t need to be crazy for basketball (or even a sports fan at all, really) to enjoy this book. If you are, though, once you finish this thoroughly biased book you might find it hard to root for Duke and Coach K ever again!

The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright.
          Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower is probably the most essential book to read this year. It’s a riveting, gracefully written, profoundly disturbing account of the history of 21st century terrorism. Wright begins in the decades following World War II and the creation of Israel, and carries the story up to its flaming conclusion in 2001. After many years of failing in their attempts to set up a theocracy in the Middle East (Egypt was their original target), Muslim fanatics turned their attention, instead, to the western powers, especially the United States. Joining together in a loose confederation under the leadership of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri following the Afghan Civil War, the newly named al-Qaeda embarked on an ambitious and meticulously planned program of death and destruction that included the bombing of the Navy guided missile destroyer U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and various western embassies in Africa. What makes this book so depressing is that it becomes clear that between the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the FBI, the U.S. had all the puzzle parts that – put together – would have prevented the suicide bombers from carrying out their martyrdoms on 9/11. But since not one of the three groups was anxious (or even willing, it appears) to share their intelligence and information, the plot unfolded nearly exactly as Osama and Zawahiri had planned. Sure, we’ve read a lot of what Wright covers in both newspapers and in other books (Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies, for one), but never have all the facts been amassed in one place, and never in so much detail. If there’s a hero in Wright’s book, it’s John O’Neill, the all-too-human FBI agent so angry and frustrated by the bureaucracy that prevented an all- out push to get bin Laden that he retired from the bureau and started work as the chief of security at the World Trade Center in late August of 2001 and died, age 50, on September 11. The title of the book comes from a chapter in the Koran, “Wherever you are, death will find you,/even in the looming tower,” which bin Laden repeated several times in a speech he gave to his followers in the weeks leading up to September 11.

Not a Girl Detective by Susan Kandel.
       This is Kandel's second in a mystery series featuring Cece Caruso, a sassy 39-year-old vintage-clothing-wearing, biographer-of-dead-mystery-writers, and amateur sleuth. She reminds me a lot of some of the heroines found in a Susan Isaacs novel. Cece, who’s writing a biography of the fictional “Carolyn Keene,” the "author” of the Nancy Drew books, is invited to keynote the annual Nancy Drew convention in Palm Springs, where she and her two best friends just happen to stumble across the dead body of a fellow attendee. The fun is not so much figuring out, along with Nancy, er, Cece, whodunit, but rather all the Nancy Drew lore Kandel leavens her story with. Not only do we learn about the Stratemeyer syndicate, the body of writers responsible for not only the Nancy Drew books but the majority of series books written between the 1920s and the 1950s, but also about the model for the original Nancy Drew covers, a feud between two of the authors, and more. This is preceded by I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason and followed by Shamus in the Green Room, both equally entertaining.

Confessions of a Teen Sleuth: A Parody by Chelsea Cain.
          And speaking of Nancy Drew: I can’t remember when I’ve laughed aloud so frequently during the reading of a book as I did while I was reading Chelsea Cain’s Confessions of a Teen Sleuth. This is a wonderful send-up of the Nancy Drew novels, framed by the premise that Carolyn Keene, Nancy’s roommate for a short time at Bryn Mawr, basically stole Nancy’s life from her out of jealousy, and retold all of her detecting adventures through a somewhat skewed lens. Here the real Nancy Drew redresses the balance, in a manuscript that she had sent to humor writer Chelsea Cain after her death. We learn of Nancy’s involvement with Frank Hardy (who, you will hardly need to be told, is the hero, along with his brother Joe, of another series of detective novels for kids); her challenging marriage to Ned Nickerson and the birth of her beloved son (who ends up marrying Trixie Beldon’s daughter); the fate of Nancy’s mother (and Nancy’s iffy relationship to her father’s second wife); her dislike of Cherry Ames (the heroine of yet another series put out by the Stratemeyer syndicate); the fates of George Fayne and Bess Marvin, Nancy’s two best chums; and so much more. Cain’s love of the Nancy Drew books and her ability to draw out and twist every ridiculous morsel from the originals combine to make for an hour or two of tremendously entertaining reading.

Golden Country by Jennifer Gilmore.
          Jennifer Gilmore’s novel is the sort of novel I’m always on the lookout for: a solid story well told, filled with appealing but imperfect people, and set in a place and time that is recognizable but unfamiliar enough to be interesting. In a narrative that spans much of the twentieth century, Gilmore intertwines the stories of two men and a woman, neighbors as children in the shtetl-like confines of Brooklyn, who are brought together as adults by marriage, a shared yearning for success, and tragedy. Door-to-door salesman Joseph Brodsky dreams up a formula for the very first two-in-one household cleaner; he hires the indomitable Frances to be its spokesperson in the early years of television. Meanwhile, Joseph’s black sheep brother Solomon (who’s married to Frances’s sister) first makes a fortune from bootlegging and then turns to organized crime, bringing along Seymour Bloom, whose son marries Joseph’s daughter. The varied experiences of these beautifully delineated characters – as well as the whole supporting cast – offers readers a rewarding experience.

The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud.
          Nearly a decade after they graduated from Brown, three friends try to navigate the rocky waters of love and work in the months before and after September 11, 2001 in Messud’s marvelous book. Marina is stuck midway in her attempt to finish writing a long overdue book on children’s fashion; Danielle is scrambling to find new ideas for the television shows she produces; Julius, a freelance critic, keeps both his personal life and his demeaning temporary office work a secret from the two women. Although all three believe that they’re destined for greatness, the only one even slightly within their circle who’s achieved that elusive goal is Marina’s father, Murray Thwaite, writer and public gadfly. Then two new men enter the scene: Ludo, a dashing Aussie who’s come to New York to edit a new magazine (it sounds as though it’s a hybrid of New York Review of Books, The Nation, and Rolling Stone), who sets about wooing Marina and at the same time plotting to discredit her father, and Marina’s college dropout cousin Bootie, who arrives from upstate New York to worship at the altar of his uncle Murray; their actions set in motion events that will affect a wide swath of people. Messud’s vivid storytelling, juggling of multiple viewpoints and plotlines, and solid characterizations (even the most minor characters seem like real people) make this an absolute pleasure to read.

Morningside Heights by Cheryl Mendelson.
          All the time I was reading Messud’s novel, I was remembering how much I enjoyed Mendelson’s Morningside Heights, so naturally I had to go back and reread this delicious first novel, which was just as good the second time around. Set in the present day in the upper West Side of Manhattan, the richly detailed list of characters focuses mainly but not exclusively on Charles and Anne Braithwaite, a married couple who discover that their devotion to the good life for themselves and their three children demands more money than they currently have. The plot revolves around a suspicious death, a missing will, a priest unhappy with his vocation, an unscrupulous lawyer, and everyone’s various friends and relations. As in the novels of Anthony Trollope, to which this novel pays loving homage, the good are ultimately rewarded and the bad are suitably punished. Written in a confiding, intimate tone, Mendelson inexorably draws you in and keeps you reading. Follow this up with its sequel (the second of a proposed trilogy), Love, Work, Children.

Little Big Man by Thomas Berger.
          If you’re looking for a great novel and a Great American Novel, don’t miss Little Big Man. (Although it was first published in 1964, I somehow missed out on reading it the first time around.) It’s one of those books that – once begun – is impossible to put down. Not only is it a cracking good story, it’s about all those big issues like identity (both national and self), the myth of the American West, civilization and its discontents, and race. 111-year-old Jack Crabb narrates the story of his event-filled life, which essentially began with the slaughter of his pioneering family on their way west after the Civil War. Soon after, Jack is adopted into a tribe of Cheyenne Indians and given the name Little Big Man by his new father, the chief. Over the following decades, Jack goes back and forth between the white and Indian cultures, trying to figure out who he is and where he belongs. As he poignantly observes at one point in his story, “God knows I thought enough about it and kept telling myself I was basically an Indian, just as when among Indians I kept seeing how I was really white to the core.” Jack describes his experiences as an Indian scout, a buffalo hunter, a scam artist, and a soldier (both for the Indians and the U.S. army), and gives us the definitive story of the Battle of the Little Big Horn (which he alone – of all the whites there – survived). Along the way we get some delightfully unexpected insights into Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp (there’s a terrific little scene in the book when Jack misunderstands Earp’s last name), George Armstrong Custer, and others. Even if you’ve seen the film (directed by Arthur Penn and starring Dustin Hoffman), don’t miss the book.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.
          History, it’s said, is always written by the victor. Thus, most of us grew up with a particular view of the opening of the American west to white settlement. A good – even necessary – antidote to that one-sidedness (and an excellent companion read to Berger’s novel) is Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, another older title that shouldn’t be missed. Its systematic (and well documented) undermining of the mythology of westward movement was controversial when it was first published (in 1970), but Brown’s retelling of the events from about 1860 to 1890 is now generally accepted by many historians. From the expulsion of the Navajos from their lands in Arizona in 1863 to the U.S. Army’s battle with the Sioux at Wounded Knee almost three decades later, readers get one heartbreaking account after another of broken promises, double crosses, and unprovoked attacks (the Sand Creek massacre is particularly painful to read about). Book discussion groups might want to read Berger’s novel one month and Brown’s history the next – together they offer us a pretty complete view of a particularly important period in American history.

The Year of Secret Assignments by Jaclyn Moriarty.
          Fans (and their moms) of the mega-popular Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series by Ann Brashares have a treat in store in the novels of Jaclyn Moriarty. My particular favorite is her second book, The Year of Secret Assignments. When they become penpals with three guys from a rival high school, Cassie, Lydia, and Emily discover romance, a mystery, a slew of Secret Assignments, and just how much fun “The Joy of the Envelope” (as their English teacher describes the letter writing assignment) can be. Composed entirely of letters, emails, diary entries, and memos, this novel showcases Moriarty’s light but sure touch; it’s sure to please teen readers. Don’t miss Moriarty’s earlier novel, Feeling Sorry for Celia, another of my favorites.