A Walk across the Sun by Corban Addison

A Walk Across the Sun begins in India, where two sheltered sisters, seventeen-year-old Ahalya and fifteen-year-old Sita, are happily strolling on the beach with their parents.  Suddenly a tsunami destroys their home and kills their parents, grandmother, and devoted servant.  The girls, desperate to get to safety, find a driver whom they expect to drive them to their school, where their teachers are waiting for them.  Instead, the man sells them into sex slavery.  Escape seems impossible.  A kind woman who works in the brothel tells them that their only hope is to be reincarnated someday into a better life.

Then an American lawyer, Thomas Clarke, comes to India to work with an organization which attempts to save women from sex slavery.  When he learns about the plight of these two underage girls, he becomes determined to save them.  His efforts lead him eventually to Paris and then to the United States.

In another plot line, Thomas’ wife, grief-stricken after the death of their infant daughter, has left Thomas to return to her parents in India, and he attempts to persuade his wife to return to him.

The novel, which is endorsed by John Grisham, is a fascinating thriller, but it also makes readers more  aware of the tragedy of an unusually cruel form of modern-day slavery.

(Helen Snow, retired from Information Services)

An Unquenchable Thirst: Following Mother Teresa in Search of Love, Service and an Authentic Life, by Mary Johnson

One of my joys in reading is that I can vicariously experience lifestyles different from my own.  This memoir by a former nun in the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by Mother Teresa, made me feel as if I were sharing her lifestyle.

As a high school student, Mary Johnson read a Time magazine article about Mother Teresa and felt called to join her order of nuns.  After her first year of college, she began her training, later taking her vows as Sister Donata.  She served in the United States and in Rome (I had expected that she would go to India; I didn’t realize that Mother Teresa’s order of nuns had convents in so many countries.)

Her memory is remarkable; she vividly portrays the people whom she encountered and writes detailed, amazingly frank descriptions of her life as a nun, sharing both the positive and negative aspects of convent life.  Donata dedicated herself to the ideals of the Missionaries of Charity and found much satisfaction in her life.  She loved studying theology, teaching other nuns, and helping to rewrite the rules of the order.  She found it rewarding to help the poor, and she had successes in training novices.  She also treasured the opportunities to spend time with Mother Teresa.  However, as an independent woman, Donata struggled with the rule of obedience.  Often she had to follow rules which seemed senseless to her or which contradicted one another, and she found it hard to obey superiors whom she could not respect, despite Mother Teresa’s command, “Do not question.”  At first, the Missionaries of Charity’s strict interpretations of the rules of poverty, which allowed her to own nothing, and chastity, which forbade any physical contact with anyone or any special friendships, were easy for her.  In time, however, chastity became difficult, especially after she fell in love with a priest.  Although a nun’s commitment is supposed to last a lifetime, Donata finally left the convent, feeling that she could not live a full, abundant life while being a nun.

(Helen Snow, retired from Information Services)

The Burning Soul by John Connolly

It all begins with ravens and then goes scarily awry.

The Burning Soul is a convoluted tale of kidnappings and murders, mobsters and small towns, private detectives and otherworldly encounters.  As a pageturner, it’s very easy to get caught up in its shenanigans, of which there are many.

Private investigator Charlie Parker is counting his blessings for being alive until he is hired by a lawyer friend to find out who is blackmailing her client Randall Haight, an accomplice years ago in the killing of a teenage girl.  Randall wants to maintain his protected identity he acquired after his term in jail, but somebody is determined to undermine his tranquil existence by mailing him disturbing reminders of his past deed.

Add to the mix the recent disappearance of a fourteen year old girl from the local community of Pastor’s Bay, Maine, and Randall stands to become a kidnapping suspect, should he reveal his true identity to the local cops.  The plot gets even messier than this, when things go nuts as far afield as Boston.   Too many people have their secrets, their own private ghosts with which to wrangle … and Pastor’s Bay is not as removed from the outside world as it would seem to be.

John Connolly writes a yarn full of shockers and violence and hauntings so real, it’s probably not advisable to read The Burning Soul right before bedtime.  I made this mistake and imagined every creak and pop at night being something other than the house settling. 

(William Hicks, Information Services)

Nightwoods by Charles Frazier

As Cold Mountain is one of my all time favorite books, it’s been easy for me to dismiss Charles Frazier as a one hit wonder.  In a fit of bias against sophomore attempts, I barely gave his Thirteen Moons a second glance.

Well, I just finished Nightwoods, Frazier’s third work of fiction, and can tell you that it stands quite well on its own.  Don’t compare it to Cold Mountain.  In fact, read it completely stand alone from its predecessor. 

Frazier’s style of writing, which to me has a dreamlike quality about it, is still present in Nightwoods.  Once again, he exhibits his multipersonal approach of weaving the story together, and returns to the mountains of North Carolina as a setting.  This time, the story takes place in the early 1960s, and self-exiled hermit Luce is caretaker to a decrepit lodge nearby her hometown that is accessible by roads so winding that it might as well be in the next county.  Luce cherishes her solitude, which abruptly ends when news comes of her sister Lily’s murder at the hands of her sketchy husband, and Lily’s two emotionally damaged children are pawned off on Luce, courtesy of the state.

Luce learns the hard way how to be an impromptu parent to her difficult charges; she tries to teach them how to speak and to dissuade them of their pyromaniacal tendencies.  The tension ratchets higher when her sister’s husband comes prowling back into town, looking for a large amount of hidden money to which he thinks the kids are privy.  Add a potential romantic interest in the person of the lodge’s ex-owner’s grandson, and Luce has a drastically changed scenario.  And the suspense keeps piling up all the way to the end.

Nightwoods is not some easy reading cozy – far from it.  The characters are edgy, hard, damaged, and totally worth getting caught up in.  This book might be a challenge for someone not used to Frazier’s writing style, but I ate it up.  And his description of the outdoor world of the mountains makes the novel a shoe-in for any Blue Ridge/Smokies fan who loves nature and a good yarn.

I think it’s likely that I will give Thirteen Moons a second chance.

(William Hicks, Information Services)

God Bless America: Stories by Steve Almond

I first read Candyfreak several years back, and liked Steve Almond’s funny and twisted writing approach.  So when God Bless America came out recently, I tore through it in less than a week, and experienced lots of laughing (I need to quit reading in public places – people look at you funny) and some tears.

Almond’s characters are not pretty people.  There’s several here that aren’t even likeable, but yet, Almond manages to recreate their convoluted lives into something often humorous, or at least worthy of pondering.  And ponder you will.  Most of these stories do not finish with tidy endings – they often leave off with an unsettled feel.  Read on though, and enjoy.

Meet a would-be actor with higher aspirations than his tourist guide job who floats off into wilder waters with an unexpected cargo, a jaded and faded ticket checker at Logan airport that becomes the reluctant caretaker of a bratty kid, and a busboy pressed into service as a waiter for a lonely drunk woman.  The other stories get stranger, and sometimes sadder, but Almond has such an engaging style that you’ll probably keep the pages turning, particularly if bawdiness is not an issue.  Frankly, I find David Sedaris bawdy at times, but hilarious; if you like him, you’ll possibly like Steve Almond.

A couple of the stories take place in North Carolina locales (“Hope Wood” in Winston-Salem and “What The Bird Says” in Asheville) which was pleasantly surprising; it turns out that Almond was at UNCG in the mid 1990s getting his MFA in creative writing.

(William Hicks, Information Services)

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

An aging person can hope, somewhat in vain, that in his/her past they’ve been nothing but exemplary to friends, colleagues, and lovers.  But their memory, flawed as it can be, occasionally glosses over on what really happens.  What if this person does something derogatory in a fit of youthful passion, thinks nothing of it for years, and then endures the repercussions forty years later?

The Sense of an Ending addresses this phenomena with the person of Tony Webster, a retired Englishman whose life has been satisfactory but less than distinguished.  He muses on his past life as a student and the friends he had, in particular Adrian, a latecomer to his group of cronies, who is well beyond the others in intelligence. 

Relations between Tony and Adrian sour when Adrian begins to date Tony’s ex-girlfriend Veronica, and a scathing letter by Tony to Adrian is the last correspondence between the two, until Adrian commits suicide a short time later.  Flash forward to Tony’s retirement years, where he lives a reasonably comfortable existence and maintains amiable relations with his ex-wife.  A strange inheritance from his ex-girlfriend’s mother prompts Tony to find out more from Veronica.  Through email and several meetings with her, Tony discovers more than he bargained for, and begins to look at himself far more critically.

The Sense of an Ending is a quick read and a sound example of how one recreates the past and suffers through the realities of it.  The references to class differences and popular culture in England are subtle yet enlightening, but Tony’s mental state is the main focus of the book. 

To learn more about the Man Booker prize, which this book won in 2011, click here.

(William Hicks, Information Services)

What’s the Economy for, Anyway? by John de Graaf and David K. Batker

For most of the past seventy years, the almighty Gross Domestic Product has been the prime determinant in figuring and keeping track of economic growth.  In recent times, though, with a hard-to-shake recession, it’s becoming harder to accept the GDP, or economic growth itself, as an accurate measure of how well our economy really works, and whether it serves us or we serve it.

The authors set forth a brash, humorous batch of suggestions for solving our current economic woes, and do so by humanizing the problems that beset us.  They discuss such issues as health care, work hours, retirement systems, and the like, bringing up examples of what works well elsewhere in the world, and also include historical perspectives that remind the reader that even a hundred years or more ago, some people were considering such things as vacation time and limited work hours as important. 

Are their suggestions idealistic?  In lots of ways, yes.  But, with many of the examples here, what de Graaf and Batker put forth as alternatives to our current situation are doable in the long run.  Take a look at What’s The Economy for, Anyway?, and draw your own conclusions.

(William Hicks, Information Services)

 

Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

As a collection of essays, Pulphead touches on pop culture, curmudgeonly southern writers, early 19th century naturalists, and other topics.  It’s easy to get lost in Sullivan’s writing, and for the most part, it’s a worthy immersion.

Some of the subjects of these are potentially tired, in that they’ve been written on plenty in previous times – cases in point would be Michael Jackson and Axl Rose.  However, both of Sullivan’s essays on these pop star icons proved insightful and interesting to read.  Michael Jackson in particular I now see with a different facet – Sullivan’s thoughts on him are sympathetic and eye-opening without being sensationalistic.

Other subjects are more obscure, but no less enticing.  In “Mr. Lytle:  An Essay”, Sullivan describes the travails of being a caretaker for an aging man of letters, an eccentric gent who regardless of his foibles is instrumental in giving the author strong insights into the writing craft.  In “Unnamed Caves”, the reader gets to explore the little known world of early Native American cave art in the American southeast.  And in one of the more humorous works in this collection, Sullivan recounts the joys of lending his family’s historical house out for filming a popular TV show – aficionados of our own state’s Wilmington will like this one for the setting alone.

The author also gets the down and dirty on the Katrina aftermath in Mississippi, Christian rock festivals, devotees of obscure blues recordings, and gets audiences with musicians as diverse as Bunny Wailer and John Fahey.  For diversity of subject matter, Pulphead doesn’t lack and largely delivers.  The essays are occasionally long-winded, but worth the ride, and genuinely get the reader involved.

(William Hicks, Information Services)

The Outlaw Album by Daniel Woodrell

For fans of Winter’s Bone, here’s the new short story collection by Daniel Woodrell.  His subjects for The Outlaw Album are still the unflinching folk of the Missouri Ozarks, Woodrell’s own stomping grounds.  Their tales are raw and occasionally grisly and reflect to a marvelous effect the hard lives of this unforgiving landscape.

Woodrell does gritty better than anybody, and writes about desolation and hardship so eloquently that the reader easily inhabits the world of his characters, and what an unsettling world - characters include a neighbor who not only murders the rich man next door, but feels compelled to repeat the act on what’s left of the dead body; the owner of a backwoods campground who revels in the beauty of the place even after he stands down troublemakers and dreads their repercussions; the musings of a man in a relationship that’s gone off, and others.  Most of these stories are deceptively brief and are worth a second read just to re-affirm the surprise factor.  One of them (Woe to Live On) is longer and looks like what Woodrell fleshed out to be the book of the same name, later realized on film as Ang Lee’s Ride with the Devil.

(William Hicks, Information Services)

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

No one can spin a web of Gothic intrigue, slow on the onset but building a solid suspense, quite like Sarah Waters.

I read Fingersmith years ago and enjoyed it – a dense read, but a tense tale, and Waters writes well.  In The Little Stranger, she still delivers, in the form of a ghost story.  At first, it seems a bit contrived – a formerly rich family in their ruined mansion who don’t exactly come to terms with the changing world around them.  The story is told from the person of Dr. Faraday, who calls on the Ayres family at Hundreds Hall, their estate house, to check on their sick maid, and becomes increasingly involved with the Ayreses as the days pass.  At first, they seem fairly sedate.  Mrs. Ayres is the gracious mistress of the estate.  Her children are both in their twenties – Roderick, who has assumed the overwhelming duties of keeping the estate up after his hospital recovery following World War II, and Caroline, a few years older, a plain, yet extremely capable lady who has stayed with her family to help Roderick with upkeep.

Things take a bad turn when a small child is mauled by the family dog at a dinner party held at the house the same night that Roderick has a spell and refuses to come down from his room.  And the situation grows worse from then on, as Roderick quickly looses sanity; he insists that the house is “infected” and he’s the only one to keep its dark forces at bay.

Craziness, guilt, and the family “taint” all play front stage in this slow burner of a ghost yarn.  If you are looking for a quick read, The Little Stranger probably isn’t it.  But, if you enjoy a steady suspense level and like Sarah Waters’ writing, go for it.  It’s still the Halloween season.

(William Hicks, Information Services)