Compulsive Overreader

Compulsive Overreader Picks Up and Moves

2007-03-29T17:24:00.003-07:00

Compulsive Overreader has a new home! Come see me there.

God Laughs and Plays, by David James Duncan (LentBook #10)

2007-03-24T11:51:00.000-07:00

My brilliant and well-read friend Jamie recommended David James Duncan's books to me. Duncan has actually written a few novels, but since I wanted to read him during Lent, I had to go for his non-fiction book, a collection of essays, talks and interviews that give a fair overview of how David James Duncan thinks.

Duncan is an environmentalist who mostly writes about fly-fishing and saving rivers, but he also has an eclectic approach to spirituality that doesn't have much time for organized religion (the book is subtitled "Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right").

What caught my eye right off was the fact that Duncan's own background was Seventh-day Adventist, as is mine. He was raised in an SDA home although he never felt much strong connection to the faith and left it as a teenager (as did most of his family, eventually). He seems to have emerged from this experience with a rather sketchy grasp of SDA doctrine -- for example, he appears to think SDAs believe in an eterntally burning hell. But perhaps this is not so much doctrinal inattention as a lack of interest in the specifics: David James Duncan emerged from an SDA upbringing with a strong dislike for conservative Christian sects that think they have a monopoly on truth, and in a sense he's willing to tar them all with the same brush.

He's not as bitter as you might expect, though, towards SDAs -- no more so than he is towards any of the Christian right, and certainly less so than he is towards the Bush government's policies in Iraq. He does discuss his relationship to the SDA church in a very thoughtful and balanced interview with Craig Van Rooyen, included in this volume. But mostly, his attention is elsewhere -- on a universalist and pluralist sense of God that can be found in many different religious traditions but (for him) most surely and honestly in the natural world.

Despite my best efforts, nature mysticism has little appeal for me, and I enjoyed the book more when Duncan was railing about politics than when he was rhapsodizing about rivers (although I do agree that rivers are great and should be kept clean and fishfull -- it just doesn't hit me on an emotional level like it does him). I was relieved that the book was free of the sort of hearty machismo I dread in the writing of male environmentalists. There's humour in this collection of writing, and anger, and passion for a vision of God that's not restricted by the kind of boundaries most Christian churches (including mine) place on the idea of God. Definitely a lot to ponder here.

Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert (LentBook #9)

2007-03-23T11:45:00.001-07:00

Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir about a year spent travelling in Italy, India and Indonesia in search of inner piece, is the latest in my collection of "spiritual journey memoirs" and destined to be one of my all-time favourites. I read it in about twenty-four hours and it wouldn't even be accurate to say I devoured the book -- it was more like I inhaled it, racing through the pages as if I were being pulled along in Gilbert's wake on her trip around the world.

After a devastating divorce and the break-up of her post-divorce love affair, Elizabeth Gilbert was left depressed and shattered. She decided (with the help of an advance from a publisher, which always helps in these matters) to take a year off travelling the world and trying to put herself back together. She spent four months in Italy immersing herself in the pursuit of pleasure, mostly in the form of really good pasta and platonic relationships with gorgeous young Italian men. Next, she went to an Indian ashram for four months to study meditation (this wasn't on a whim -- she had already been practicing yoga seriously for several years). Finally, she wound up on the front porch of an ancient medicine man in Bali, living there for four months while she tried to figure out how to balance the life of pleasure and the life of devotion.

I also would like to know how to balance the life of pleasure and the life of devotion. I also would not mind having four months in Bali to work it out. But perhaps surprisingly, I did not feel resentful of Elizabeth Gilbert's options, or consider her a self-centred, pampered North American on a self-absorbed Quest for Meaning. This is probably because her writing is so honest, funny and engaging that I was completely drawn into the story and felt like I knew the author as a friend.

Gilbert comes across as completely sincere -- her story reminded me in some ways of Jennifer Cox's Around the World in 80 Dates, but there was no sense of frivolity or manipulation in Eat, Pray, Love because the spiritual aspect of her quest was undeniably real. I found this book absorbing, entertaining, and thought-provoking.

When Jesus Came to Harvard, by Harvey Cox (LentBook #8)

2007-03-23T11:38:00.000-07:00

When Jesus Came to Harvard is subtitled Making Moral Choices Today. The book is based around Cox's experience of teaching an extremely popular seminar on Jesus and moral choices at Harvard University for several years. He poses the question: How can the life and teachings of Jesus guide people in making moral choices in today's world, when we face questions and dilemmas that didn't exist in Bible times? He suggests that Jesus offers timeless principles that he and his students explored in the seminar and which can be applied today.

The book then takes episodes from Jesus' life and examples from His teaching chapter by chapter in chronological order and explores each, with references to what Cox taught in class and how his students responded to this aspect of the Jesus story. He has some interesting insights into how to talk about Jesus in a multi-cultural classroom with a variety of religious backgrounds represented, and his class certainly sounds like it would have been fun and thought-provoking.

But --here's the thing -- he really doesn't answer the question he set out to ask. Many of the reflections on Jesus' life and teaching don't actually shed much light on how those Bible passages can be applied to help us make moral decisions. For example, Cox talks about the parables as being sort of like Zen koans -- open-ended stories without clear "lessons," designed to jolt us out of our familiar paradigms and help us think about things from a different perspective. Yet he doesn't clearly connect this to the issue of morality or how we make moral choices. In the ended, I thought his course (and by extension his book) though an interesting look at Jesus, was probably not that much different in scope from the standard "Life and Teachings of Jesus" class -- without any special insight to offer on how studying Jesus helps us confront the moral issues of the twenty-first century world. Good book, well worth a read, but I'm not entirely sure it does what it says on the tin.

Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller (LentBook #7)

2007-03-13T12:25:00.000-07:00

I picked this up on a whim the other day in Chapters -- the title and author sounded familiar; I thought it had been referenced in Shaine Claiborne's The Irresistible Revolution. (I still haven't checked to see if I'm right about that). When I came home I said to Jason, "You know how I like memoirs and collections of essays by women talking about their spiritual journeys? Well, this one is a departure...."

He guessed, "It's by a man?"

Got it in one.

I tend to be kind of sexist in my reading in general (novels and memoirs should be written by women, though men can write other kinds of non-fiction, and certain fiction genres like fantasy) so it's not surprising that this was a new area for me to explore: a man talking about his spiritual life. (Yeah, I know men pretty much invented the genre, St. Augustine and all -- hey, as my co-worker Ann said of me once, "At least you own your prejudices!")

Back cover blurbery describes Donald Miller as sort of like Anne Lamott with testosterone, which is not a bad comparison. He has the same self-deprecating humour and postmodern approach to both Christianity and essay-writing, which is to say that we're wandering through his stream of consciousness picking up small gems of insight he's discovered along the way. He's not as funny as Anne Lamott, but then, who is? As for the testosterone, I think what stood out to me was not what a guy Donald Miller is, but what a young guy he is -- or at least, was when he wrote this book. Barely 30, I gather. Looking back from the vast heights of 40+ I realize I am turning into that crotchety old woman who mutters, "What has some young whippersnapper got to teach me about Christian spirituality?" Got to watch that tendency!!!

It was interesting reading this book in tandem with Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World (one of the things I love about my Lenten reading project is the strange bedfellows it produces). Everything Carl Sagan hates about "spirituality" -- that vague sense of "I believe it because I believe it," the willingness to brush off difficult questions rather than exploring them -- is here in this memoir. While there were times I wanted Don to be more sharply focused and follow his ideas through to their logical conclusions, I also enjoyed being a fellow traveller on his journey for a couple of hundred pages. There are places where he seems naive and a few where he comes across as self-righteous, but I kept turning pages and nodding at things I agreed with. I'd read another Donald Miller book if it came across my path (and there are others) so I guess I need to drop my biases and admit that yes, men can write well about their own spiritual journeys, too.

The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan (LentBook #6)

2007-03-13T11:34:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, on a now-defunct discussion board where I used to post, I noticed that Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World was something of a bible for hardcore atheists who insisted that only that which was verifiable by the scientific method was "true." I commented that I intended to read the book sometime, but was almost afraid to ... maybe I thought it would turn me into an atheist.

One of my atheist cyber-friends quite rightly wrist-slapped me for this comment, pointing out that my faith must not be very strong if I was afraid to expose myself to challenging ideas. In some ways I think much of the reading and thinking I've done over the past five or six years has been an attempt to get past those fears, to ask the questions I've been afraid to ask, to see how my beliefs hold up if I really allow them to be closely examined. It's been an interesting process.

So this year, while making up my Lenten reading list, I decided it was time to include Carl Sagan's scary book. Not so scary, it turns out.

Carl Sagan loved science. I mean, he really, really loved it. Though he didn't have much use for any organized religion, I think it's fair to say that science was his religion: he believed that through the rigorous use of critical thinking and the scientific method, humanity could create a better world. Unfortunately, he also thought that critical thinking was becoming an endangered process in the late twentieth century.

Stories of alien abduction, UFO sightings, New Age channeling, faith healing, religious authority -- anything that doesn't stand up to scientific scrutiny falls beneath Sagan's withering critical contempt in this often witty book. He doesn't entirely rule out the concept of a god of some kind, pointing out that the way the universe is organized is exactly what he would expect of a creator, if there were one. But sacred texts, religious observances, and belief in answered prayer are all in the category of "superstition" for Sagan.

Sagan has prior assumptions of his own here that he doesn't examine or criticize (and although I'm writing in the literary present tense, it's obviously a bit late for him to examine these now, since he's dead), but he is right about the widespread credulity and lack of scientific knowledge in the general North American population. I find I can agree with much of what he says while continuing to believe there are other kinds of "truth" than those that can be demonstrated in the laboratory.

The Emerging Christian Way, by Marcus Borg, Matthew Fox, Tom Harpur et al (LentBook #5)

2007-03-07T03:09:00.000-08:00

Some of the writers in The Emerging Christian Way -- most notably Marcus Borg, whose essay kicks off the collection -- dissociate themselves from the label "liberal" in favour of talking about an "emerging paradigm" of Christianity. But that's mostly rhetoric: this collection of essays is about what we all recognize as "liberal Christianity," that is, Christians in the mainline Protestant denominations who question traditional doctrines such as the divinity of Christ and the authority of the Bible, yet who still find Christianity meaningful and significant.

There's nothing wrong with this book speaking to that audience, but something in the packaging made me hope that the writers would address a broader spectrum of Christians, that there would be something here for someone like me who self-identifies as a conservative within Christianity, a liberal within my denomination, and who's very excited by the idea of "emergent" Christianity as described by Brian McLaren. I'm interested in visions of Christianity that transcend traditional boundaries and categories, and I thought The Emerging Christian Way might present such a vision.

But it doesn't. There's no real interest here in building bridges with more conservative Christians; indeed, as Marcus Borg says up front, this "emerging paradigm" of Christianity is so different from the traditional paradigm that they might as well be two different religions. Fair enough; most conservative Christian writers I read aren't that interested in building bridges to the liberal wing of the faith, either. But since there are elements of both liberal and conservative Christianity that appeal to me, those bridges are of interest to me.

Again, there's nothing wrong with this book (which is published in Canada and, despite the presence of essays by Borg and Fox, has a distinctly Canadian slant) if you're looking for a guide to what it means to be a Christian even though you don't accept all the traditional doctrines. The book turned out not to be quite what I was looking for, but what it does, it does quite well.

Living Buddha, Living Christ, by Thich Nhat Hanh (LentBook #4)

2007-03-06T16:16:00.000-08:00

For some time I've been curious about what Christians can learn from Buddhists. I believe there is a lot of wisdom in all spiritual traditions, and when I've read Buddhist authors or heard Buddhist acquaintances talking about some of the concepts of their religion, I've been interested to know more.

One of those Buddhist acquaintances suggested I should read something by Thich Nhat Hanh, one of the most famous Buddhist teachers of the 20th century. When I found this book, it seemed like a good fit, because it's basically about some of the parallels between Buddhist and Christian teaching, and what Christians can learn from Buddhism.

While I don't agree with everything Thich Nhat Hanh says in this short, easy-to-read book, I did feel like I gained some insight from it. I'm particularly interested in a better understanding of the concept of mindfulness, because I feel like I don't live enough in the present moment -- my mind is always flitting off to some other place, and I'm often multi-tasking. Multi-tasking, while a virtual necessity for a working mom, turns out to be a bad idea if you want to practice mindfulness. If the Buddhist monk is washing his bowl, he should be giving careful attention to the task of washing the bowl -- as opposed to talking on the phone and supervising the kids' homework, which is what I'm usually doing when washing my dishes. Of course, monks don't have kids' homework to supervise, which is why they are monks, but if they did I'm pretty sure they'd focus on the homework and the homework alone, mindfully present in the moment.

Clearly I have a long way to go in practicing mindfulness, but I am working on it. Any Christian interested in broadening his or her perspective to learn a little about (and from) Buddhism could probably pick up a thing or two from Living Buddha, Living Christ, even if you don't agree that Buddha and Christ are both "living" today in the exact same sense. (Thich Nhat Hanh would probably say that both Buddha and Christ are living through the followers who practice their teachings, but being a fairly traditional Christian I think Christ is living in that sense and also in the literal sense of being still alive). You might even find it inspiring in places. I did.

Misquoting Jesus, by Bart D. Ehrman (LentBook #3)

2007-03-01T05:52:00.000-08:00

Along with books that inspire me, I usually try to rig my Lenten reading list to include some books that will challenge and maybe even disturb me as well. The title and the buzz I'd heard around Misquoting Jesus made it seem like a book that might challenge my conservative approach to Biblical inspiration and reveal disturbing new insights into the process of transcribing and translating the New Testament.

In fact, this wasn't that book at all. Misquoting Jesus does talk about scribal changes, intentional and unintentional, in the New Testament. However, there's not one thing in the book that would be unfamiliar to anyone who uses a Bible transation with footnotes -- for example, the "shocking fact" that the story of Jesus forgiving the adulterous woman is not in the oldest manuscripts of John 8 and may not be an original part of the gospels at all. Does anyone not know that? (My favourite non-scholarly argument on that passage comes from Thomas Cahills' Desire of the Everlasting Hills: he believes the story originally belonged in Luke, because Cahill likes this story and likes Luke's portrayal of Jesus, whereas he thinks John's Jesus is big jerk who wouldn't have done something nice like this.)

Most of Ehrman's "revelations" are exactly of this calibre: an analysis of textual variations that are normally footnoted in most modern translations of the New Testament. What Erhman adds that's new and useful -- and he does it very well -- is a good overview of what textual criticism is and how it works, intended for the intelligent but non-scholarly reader (i.e., me). As a general reader who has read tons of books which refer to and rely on textual criticism, I found it really useful to read about how the process actually works and some of the history behind it.

However, a book with a title like An Overview of Textual Criticism for the General Reader would probably sell 37 copies in a university bookstore somewhere, whereas a book called Misquoting Jesus is, in these post-DaVinci Code days, almost certainly to be a bestseller. The suggestion that Ehrman has new and controversial truths to unfold will no doubt cause people to buy the book, but the only people who will be shocked or shaken up by its contents will be people who hold to a very narrow view of verbal inspiration. The rest of us have pretty much taken on board the fact that the Bible is a human document (whether divinely inspired or not) and that both the original text and the subsequent scribal copies are open to human error. There's certainly nothing here that's going to shake up my faith in Scripture.

Since it's a popular rather than a scholarly book, Ehrman takes the liberty -- inappropriately, I think -- of presenting a lot of his own speculations as firm conclusions rather than possibilities. Assumptions about why a text was changed, which in a scholarly article would have to be hedged about with fences of "it may be" and "a possible explanation" are here presented as fact, which may be a disservice to naive readers who tend to believe things just because the author sounds authoritative and scholarly. I would be happier with Ehrman if he had flagged the fact that his own speculations are simply that -- one possible understanding of the text -- and had questioned some of his own underlying assumptions and biases, thus drawing attention to the fact that he is just as fallible as the Biblical scribes whose work he's critiquing.

Bottom line: There's some useful stuff here, and I would have gotten the book out of the library even if had been called An Overview of Textual Criticism for the General Reader. I'm not impressed with the decision of either Ehrman or his publisher to give the book a "hot," controversial title that doesn't really reflect the book's contents, but that's the way the business works. In fact, I'm kind of wishing my publisher had chosen to call my novel (The Violent Friendship of Esther Johnson) something more attention-grabbing -- like Sex with Swift, maybe? Whatever sells copies!!

Confessions of an Amateur Believer, by Patty Kirk (LentBook #2)

2007-02-25T06:48:00.000-08:00

Patty Kirk's first book is my latest discovery in another of my favourite genres: memoirs by women about their spiritual journeys. My best-loved authors in this genre are Anne Lamott (of course), Nora Gallagher, and Lauren Winner. Patty Kirk's voice didn't leap off the page and grab me as quickly and securely as any of those authors' voices did, but as I got into this collection of essays, I felt like I was getting to know the author and enjoying her unrelentingly honest portrayal of her journey through faith.

I think I know why I like books like these. Like many people growing up in evangelical churches, I had a lot of exposure when I was young to conversion stories, both written and preached, in which a person's life before they come to faith is a terrible mess and then they accept Jesus. And like "they married and lived happily ever after" at the end of a fairy tale, "I accepted Jesus and lived happily ever after" is the end of a testimony.

Except that in real life, it's not: it's the beginning of a journey. I love books that explore the ups and downs of the journey that begins after you kneel at the foot of the cross (I also love memoirs like this from faiths other than Christianity, although I haven't found as many as I'd like). Patty Kirk does have a conversion story -- she grew up in a Catholic family, left God and church behind and lived much of her adult life as an atheist, then converted to her Baptist husband's evangelical Christianity. But that story is told in the margins of the central theme of this book: what it's like to live day by day as a struggling, doubting, hoping Christian wife, mother, teacher and writer. Kirk's essays are thought-provoking, insightful, sometimes funny, and above all, honest.

The Irresistible Revolution, by Shane Claiborne (LentBook #1)

2007-02-24T09:04:00.000-08:00

Shane Claiborne's The Irresistible Revolution, an impulse buy I picked up at Chapters without knowing anything about it, is the first book in my Lenten reading series (every year I give up fiction for Lent and read a random assortment of spiritual, devotional or theological non-fiction -- basically whatever I stumble upon that looks interesting).

Shane is a 30-ish Christian social activist who has worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta and gone to Iraq with Christian Peacemakers and lives in a community called The Simple Way among the poor and homeless in inner-city Philadelphia and really believes Jesus meant it when he said to sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and come follow Him.

In other words, Shane is just the kind of guy to make a comfortable middle-class guilt-prone Christian like me double over with guilt pangs because of my comfortable middle-class lifestyle.

Fortunately, Shane discourages guilt, which makes the book fun to read, although still challenging. It has a light, breezy, po-mo tone. Shane is absolutely the most idealistic person I've ever met -- not that I've met him, but after reading the book I feel like I have -- but his earnest idealism is saved from pomposity by his gentle self-mocking humour. It's a good book, in every possible sense of the word.

I am happy to announce (and I'm sure my parents will be relieved to hear this) that after reading this book Jason and I are not planning to sell our home and move the kids into a cardboard box downtown. I am, however, challenged to re-examine a lot of my own choices and priorities -- without allowing myself to become guilt-ridden.

For example: I work with the poor. Sure, some of my students are nice middle-class kids who just had difficulty in school, but others are truly poor and some are almost literally homeless. And the job I do is directly related to helping them improve their situation. I love my work, and I love my students. But it's not sacrificial -- I don't give up anything to do this job; I get paid a nice generous middle-class wage to do it. So I feel like my involvement with the poor doesn't really cut it by Shane Claiborne's standard of Christian living.

Rather than beating myself up over that, I'm trying to think of ways to do the things I now do -- plus just a little bit more -- so that I give more of myself, so that I'm less attached to the nice middle-class stuff that surrounds me. Today, for example, Jason and I decided to buy a water buffalo instead of a dishwasher, and I hold Shane Claiborne directly responsible for that. It's a long way from a truly Simple Way, but it's starting where I am now. This book is challenging and inspiring, especially for anyone who calls themselves a Christian.

Abundance, by Sena Jeter Naslund

2007-02-23T15:57:00.000-08:00

I like Sena Jeter Naslund. Every novel I've read of hers has been slow to get into, never a fast or page-turning read, but always, ultimately, beautiful and rewarding. Abundance fits the bill on most of these counts: like Ahab's Wife and Four Spirits it was by no means a quick read for me, but it did pull me in more as I went along. The writing is beautiful (when it escapes being self-consciously literary). The one thing I'd have to question is whether it was, in the end, a rewarding read.

Abundance is a novel in my favourite genre -- a fictional portrayal of a real-life historical woman, in this case Marie Antoinette. Naslund's prologue makes it clear that she sympathizes with Antoinette and sets out to write a sympathetic portrayal of her. While Antoinette comes alive as a character, and the setting is vividly realized, in the end I found the author's view of the character too uncritical to believe. Marie Antoinette is not, as Naslund is at pains to point out, the heartless bitch who allegedly said, "Let them eat cake!" when told the peasants had no bread. She was, however, as Naslund portrays her, almost unbelievably self-centred and naive to the point of stupidity -- yet these qualities are never examined; we are expected to go on sympathizing with her even as she makes decisions that are clearly ridiculous and help to make the monarchy look frivolous and irresponsible in the eyes of the French people. She emerges from this novel as a pathetic, rather than a tragic figure. Maybe that was what Naslund wanted to portray.

Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas, by Annie Jones

2007-02-23T12:44:00.000-08:00

The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas is the latest of my forays into "Christian women's fiction," In the case of this novel, the cover art, breezy tone, and Steeple Hill Cafe imprint all suggest it's best categorized as "Christian chicklit" -- light, humourous, but with a spiritual undertone.

Seldom have I wanted to like a book as much as The Sisterhood..., without actually liking it. I love the fact that the main characters are not twenty-something girls looking for romance, but retired ministers' wives who for the first time in their busy lives have the freedom to explore who they are outside of the spotlight of their husbands' ministry. Odessa and Maxine's interracial sister-like friendship plays out against the backdrop of a Texas flea market and a group of younger women in whose lives the Queen Mama's meddle and matchmake, with grace-filled results.

Doesn't that sound like a winner of a book? It's a great premise, and the narrative voice -- Odessa's stream-of-consciousness rambling punctuated by some practically postmodern interruptions from Maxine -- should be a winner. Sadly, it was in the voice that the book fell down for me. I found the narrator(s) too self-consciously cutesy, to the point that in places they began to grate on my nerves. Also, I found the plot hung together poorly -- all too often I was caught up in an incident, anxious to see how it turned out as a chapter ended on a cliffhanger -- only to discover that the next chapter moved onto a different scene and a different day, without ever resolving the situation or leaving the resolution offstage, only briefly alluded to. This frustrated me -- everytime I was getting invested emotionally, I felt cheated.

Still, the premise of the book is engaging and there's a lot of fun as well as a lot of faith here. Since the things that bothered me were mainly stylistic, it's entirely possible that another reader could pick up the same book and fall completely in love with it. If you like Christian fiction, you could do worse than to give this book a try -- but it's possible that, like me, you'll find that it doesn't live up to its title, its cover, or its potential.

Helen of Troy, by Margaret George

2007-01-30T06:03:00.000-08:00

Margaret George is one of my Goddesses of Historical Fiction (the other being Sharon Kay Penman. Philippa Gregory is vying for entrance to the pantheon, but the jury is still out). I fell in love with George's first blockbuster historical novel, The Autobiography of Henry VIII, and have read every one since. Mary Queen of Scots, Cleopatra, Mary Magdalene ... and now, Helen of Troy.

I have to confess that while I've enjoyed every one of these novels, none has had the emotional impact of the Henry VIII one, lines and images from which still linger in my mind (although it may be that that's the only one I've reread. But then: why? Because it's the best). Seems funny to me that a female author's most intimate and intense portrayal of a historical character should be the one male character she wrote about, but that's just the way I read them.

That being said, there's no such thing as a bad Margaret George novel, in my opinion, and Helen of Troy is certainly a good one. It was also an educational read for me, as my background in all things Greek is woefully lacking. I often tell my students what I myself was told in first-year university: if you want to understand English literature, you need a solid grounding in two things: the Bible, and Greek mythology. Due to the peculiarities of an Adventist education, I am superbly well-versed in the first, and virtually ignorant of the second.

In fact, I have to admit that prior to reading this novel, not only had I not read the Iliad and the Odyssey; most of my knowledge about the Trojan War came from watching the justifiably panned movie Troy, with Brad Pitt pouting through the role of Achilles. (If by chance you have missed this movie, or seen it and want something to laugh at, please skip straight to Troy in 15 Minutes, one of the funniest things ever posted on the internet).

Okay. Deep breath. Back to Margaret George and her not-quite-historical subject, Helen of Troy. Not knowing the story was actually an advantage for me, because I did come to the novel with a certain freshness and openness. And it is a good story, told from Helen's point of view and very readable and engaging. George's decision to have her characters act and speak in a rather lofty and mythic style distances them somewhat from the reader, sadly, and for me it prevented me from feeling truly close to the characters or really sharing their sorrows. The passage of time in the novel is odd, too -- a problem George admits grappling with in the Afterword, but one which I didn't feel was handled satisfactorily. I never had the sense of time passing, of the characters growing older, as they must have done.

Despite the feeling that I wanted more from this novel than it gave me, I did thoroughly enjoy reading it, and will be waiting for the next Margaret George historical novel. I wonder who she's going to tackle next?

Clementine, by Sara Pennypacker, illustrated by Marla Frazee

2007-01-24T16:47:00.000-08:00

And now for something completely different -- I review a children's book!

You'd think I'd do this more as we certainly have enough of them in the house and I read enough of them aloud. But rarely am I impressed enough to add a kids' book to my list of reviews. Clementine is a definite exception!

My parents bought this book for Emma, for Christopher's birthday (don't ask) and by the time the kids went to bed that evening, most of the adults in the room had had a look at the book and read a few sentences out loud -- it's just that engaging. This did, however, make me fear that it was going to be one of those kids' books enjoyed mainly by adults -- because you're laughing at the child character, rather than with her.

Clementine could be that kind of book -- the title-character, an overly-imaginative third-grader, could easily be labelled with both ADHD and OCD, and I'm sure her principal would love to get her on an ISSP if she's not already -- but it's not. The humour is as appealing to kids as to adults, though perhaps for different reasons. Emma and Christopher's favourite part was when Clementine suggests to her apartment-building-superintendent father that the pigeon-poop problem on the outside of the building can be solved by putting tiny diapers on all the pigeons. My favourite part was when Clementine's baby brother asks to "Go for a wok?" and Clementine puts him in the wok and spins him around the kitchen floor. Really, there's something for everyone here.

Emma loved having the book read aloud, and Christopher, while disdainfully insisting that "Clementine's weird" (presumably because she's a girl) hesitantly asked if we'd come into his room to read the last couple of chapters. Clementine's perspective on the world is fresh, funny, and absolutely believable, and her family is adorable.

This is the first I've heard of Sara Pennypacker as an author, but illustrator Marla Frazee is already popular in our house, having illustrated The Seven Silly Eaters, which is one of Emma's favourite books, and On the Morn of Mayfest, which we also enjoyed. I notice that Amazon has a listing for a sequel called The Talented Clementine, scheduled for release in April 2007, and I can definitely see this series holding a permanent spot on our bookshelves.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter, by Kim Edwards

2007-01-24T16:19:00.000-08:00

The first new book I read in 2007 -- as opposed to re-reads, which I've been doing a lot of! -- was Kim Edwards' The Memory Keeper's Daughter, which caught my eye when I picked it up in the bookstore one day. (Then I went and got it from the library; I rarely take chances on buying books I haven't read unless I'm very familiar with the author).

This novel begins with a fascinating premise, very loosely based on a real-life incident. On a winter night in 1964, a young doctor delivers his own twins. Discovering that one of them has Down Syndrome, he gives her to his nurse to secretly take to an institution -- and tells his wife that their baby daughter has died. Instead of carrying out his instructions, the nurse leaves town with the baby girl and raises her as her own daughter in another city.

I don't know how anyone could not want to read on and find out how this story turns out, particularly when it's as well-written as this. I raced through this book in twenty-four hours, picking it up whenever I got a spare moment. The story tells about the parallel but separate lives of the two families -- Dr. David Henry, his wife Nora, and their son Paul; Caroline Gill and her daughter Phoebe. As David and Nora's marriage flounders and Nora grieves for the daughter she believes dead, Caroline struggles to give Phoebe a full life in a world that has little understanding of or tolerance for her disability.

The novel covers thirty years in the lives of these characters and never becomes dull or tiresome, though in a couple of places it stretches credibility a little. I found all four of the viewpoint characters (David, Nora, Paul and Caroline) believable and sympathetic; I didn't always agree with their choices but always understood why they made them.

The writing is good, polished without drawing attention to itself, but there are places where Edwards over-writes and tells us things she has already shown. I got tired of being told, in so many words, that David was keeping a terrible secret that had affected everyone's lives -- we get that, it's clear from the beginning, we don't need to be told. Despite this tendency to over-narrate important moments, this is essentially a well-written page-turner that made me care about its characters and dealt sensitively with the Big Issues: grief and loss, Down Syndrome, and the progress of a marriage.

Top Ten Books of 2006

2006-12-31T12:23:00.000-08:00

With great difficulty I've managed to isolate the ten new books (i.e. not re-reads) that I enjoyed most in 2006. I can't possibly rank them in order of enjoyment so I'm listing them in the order I read them. I've linked to my earlier reviews of each book.

1. Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road
2. Ami McKay, The Birth House
3. Joan Clark, An Audience of Chairs
4. Andrea Levy, Small Island
5. Sarah Dunant, In the Company of the Courtesan
6. Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly
7. Joshilyn Jackson, Between, Georgia
8. Jasper Fforde, The Big Over Easy
9. Robin Hobb, Shaman's Crossing
10. Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

The stats, for anyone who cares:

10 fiction, 0 non-fiction -- not a good year for non-fiction for me!
4 Canadian, 2 British, 4 American novels
8 female, 2 male writers -- about par for the course!
3 fantasy, 5 historical fiction, 2 contemporary fiction (a bit hard to determine as I'm never sure where I should mark the cut-off to consider a book "historical" vs "contemporary")

Altogether I read about 80 books this year, which is fewer than I usually read, but only a few of them were re-reads this time, so I probably read more new books than I generally do. It's been a good reading year and I'm looking forward to discovering more great books in 2007.

Assassin's Apprentice, by Robin Hobb

2006-12-31T11:57:00.000-08:00

In my last post I raved about re-reading a favourite novel by my favourite fantasy author. I continued my Christmas fantasy excursion by reading an old, but new-to-me, trilogy from my other favourite fantasy author. This was Robin Hobb's Assassin trilogy. I had read the two follow-up trilogies, The Liveship Traders and The Tawny Man, but never the original series.

Robin Hobb is a brilliant fantasy writer and in Assassin's Apprentice she introduces one of her most compelling and believable characters: FitzChivalry Farseer, an illegitimate son of the royal house of the Six Duchies. Six-year-old Fitz is a nobody and a political liability when he gets dumped on the royal family's doorstep, but he quickly becomes the target for competing allegiances and loyalties that will continue to affect him throughout his life. Characterization and plot are brilliant here. My only complaint would be that the third novel of the series, Assassin's Quest, is a bit slow in places -- but by that time I was committed enough to Fitz and his story to follow him wherever he went, no matter how long it took. If you're a fantasy lover and haven't yet discovered Robin Hobb, I can't recommend her novels highly enough. Start at the beginning with Assassin's Apprentice -- it's the first of nine great novels which will keep you turning pages for weeks or months (depending on how quickly you read!)

Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay

2006-12-31T11:48:00.000-08:00

As I moved into my Christmas reading this year I decided to relax with some classic fantasy, which included re-reading my all-time favourite fantasy novel, Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana. I first read this about 12 or 13 years ago and I can still remember where I was sitting when I read the final pages and discovered the surprise twist at the ending: it hit me like a kick in the stomach. For my money, nobody can constuct a plot like Kay; he keeps me constantly on the edge of my seat with twists and turns and just when I think I've got everything figured out, he pulls another surprise out of the bag. Add to that memorable characters you can't help falling in love with and a vivid, detailed, fully realized fantasy world, and you can see why I am shameless in declaring Guy Gavriel Kay the greatest living fantasy writer -- or at least the best suited to my reading tastes!

Tigana is my favourite Kay novel because the story is so poignant and heartwrenching. A small country has lost its independence to a powerful dictator -- but the dictator is also a sorcerer. As punishment for their resistance, the sorcerer cast a spell so that the name of the country -- Tigana -- would be unable to be heard or understood by anyone not born there. But wiping out the name, he literally erases the memory of a people and their culture.

The novel picks up twenty years later, when a small band of rebels is determined to overthrow the dictator and restore the name and nation of Tigana to map and memory. Every character is complex and compelling; the story never stops moving forward. I know that at least a couple of people who are near and dear to me and whose reading tastes I respect have found the beginning of Tigana slow and hard to get into, and having given up on it. I really can't relate, but I have to say that if you find the beginning slow, you should hang in there till at least page 100 and see if you don't start enjoying the ride. You don't know what you're missing.

Ten Thousand Lovers, by Edeet Ravel

2006-12-31T11:36:00.000-08:00

Ten Thousand Lovers is a spare, beautifully written novel about a young Canadian woman in Israel, Lilly, who falls in love with Ami, who is charming and lovable -- but who works as an interrogator for the Israeli army. The progress of this sweet-yet-doomed love affair, and the difficulties Lily has accepting Ami's career, are played out against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts of the 1970s.

One thing I really enjoyed were the small chapters interspersed between the main ones, in which the narrator explores the meaning and background of words, all of which provide insight into the characters and their culture.

The book is, as I said, beautifully written and I was completely absorbed while reading it. I found, however, that it didn't leave a strong emotional impact on me -- a month or so after reading it, the characters no longer live in my mind as characters from memorable books often do. I enjoyed reading it as a tragic love story and as a glimpse into a different time and place, and I would recommend it, but wouldn't count it as a favourite novel. The sadness I felt over the characters and their lives dissapated too quickly. What lingered was the sadness of realizing how little has changed in the Middle East in 30 years, and how the people who live in that region are no closer to living in a peaceful society than Lilly and Ami were.

Whitethorn Woods, by Maeve Binchy

2006-12-31T11:29:00.000-08:00

Now I know there are some literary types who look down their noses at Maeve Binchy (of course, they'd look even farther down their noses at the "inspirational romance" category I've been reading, so that's OK). However, I have to say I thoroughly enjoy a good Maeve; she's always readable, has an unerring eye and ear for human behavior and dialogue, and is witty and insightful. Some of her earlier novels, such as Echoes and Circle of Friends, are enduring favourites of mine.

The really good thing with a Maeve Binchy novel is that you know what you're getting. No unexpected twists and turns; a straightforward ride through a good story with engaging characters and a heartwarming ending. I rarely miss one of her books.

But ... here's the problem. The last few Maeve Binchies I've picked up have not been novels, even though they've been packaged to look like novels. Whitethorn Woods, whatever its pleasures (and they are many) is clearly not a novel. It is a collection of loosely linked short stories, the link being a common place (a shrine to St. Anne at a place called Whitethorn Woods). The connections between characters and stories are tenuous, but once I was willing to drop the expectation that I was getting a novel and read them as short stories I thoroughly enjoyed them. They are good, thought-provoking, heartwarming and insightful stories set in modern-day Ireland. But what I would enjoy even more would be a good thick Maeve Binchy novel in the style of Circle of Friends, where I would get attached to a small group of characters in the beginning and follow their fate over a period of months and years, rather than jumping off to get to know new people all the time.

Maeve, tell me you haven't stopped writing novels! Give me something to look forward to!

Human Traces, by Sebastian Faulks

2006-12-29T16:03:00.000-08:00

Human Traces is a big, sprawling, compelling novel set in 19th-century England and Europe. It's the story of two doctors who are pioneers in the study of the human mind -- back in the era when psychology, psychiatry and neurology were still poorly understood as disciplines and much of what went on in the brain was simply mysterious.

The story covers not only the professional careers of these two men, but also their private lives, their marriages, and the friendship that unites them. Fascinating speculations about mental illness and the nature of consciousness are interwoven into a realistic and believable human drama that kept me turning pages right to the end ... and there were over 700 pages, so that was a lot of turning!

Faulks expects a lot of his readers. Lectures and papers on fairly intricate topics are not simply summarized for easy skimming, but reproduced in their entirety -- one key lecture takes up twelve pages. If you're not interested in the subject matter of how doctors and scientists understood the problem of mental illness over a hundred years ago, the story and characters may not be enough to keep you moving forward, but if (like me) you are intrigued by the topic, you'll be interested to find it wrapped up in such a compelling story.

I had quibbles with the ending, which I found disappointing, but in general I found this a novel that required time and thought, but rewarded both generously.

A Time to Mend, by Angela Hunt

2006-12-29T15:56:00.000-08:00

Like my previous selection, Sandpiper Drift, I chose A Time to Mend specifically because I was exploring the sub-genre of "inspirational women's fiction," particularly the Steeple Hill imprint. This particular novel has a typical romance-novel plot structure: two strong-willed, independent souls strike sparks of all kinds when they meet in the hospital where she's a nurse and he's a doctor. They continually rub each other the wrong way yet can't ignore the attraction between them. Each has painful secrets in their past that stand in the way of a new relationship -- and of course there's no doubt in the reader's mind that those obstacles will be overcome by the final page. Oh, and of course she's pretty and he's gorgeous. No surprises there.

However, I'd consider A Time to Mend sort of romance-novel-plus, the "plus" being a really thorough, detailed and sensitive portrayal of a young woman's battle with breast cancer. The medical aspect of the novel -- a nurse who works with cancer patients discovers that she herself has a malignant tumour -- is far more compelling than the romance, which did feel a little formulaic to me. This was an enjoyable read and if you like inspirational romance I'd definitely recommend it, but it was the cancer story that made it memorable for me.

Sandpiper Drift, by Vanessa del Fabbro

2006-12-04T16:40:00.000-08:00

I mentioned when talking about the Ann Burton books, below, that I've always had this sort of ingrained prejudice against books that could be easily labelled romance novels -- even though I do like a good love story with a happy ending. However, the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo this year seems to fall into the category of "inspirational women's fiction" -- maybe even "inspirational romance" -- and I figured I should do some more reading in that genre to see what it had to offer.

Vanessa del Fabbro's Sandpiper Drift (the sequel to an earlier novel called The Road to Home, which I haven't read) is published by Steeple Hill, the inspirational imprint of Harlequin books. It is, however, far from being a stereotypical romance novel. Yes, it's very much popular (as opposed to "literary") fiction, but it's classic women's fiction with an emphasis on characters and relationships, a very strong and well-drawn South African setting, and a spiritual underpinning that is simply part of who the main characters are.

These characters are Monica, a white South African journalist and single mother of two adopted black sons, and Monica's housekeeper and friend, Francina, a black woman who has never dared to trust another man since her abusive husband. If there is a romance in this story, it is Francina's -- but it's very far from a romance-novel stereotype as the practical and unromantic Francina is wooed by a gentle, soft-spoken teacher who is still clinging to the memory of his dead wife. There's a hint of romance for Monica too, but it's very underplayed, presumably deferred to the next book (there is another in the works). The focus here is on how Monica's non-traditional family makes a home for themselves in a small town called Lady Helen; in the broader sense, it's about how people, both black and white, are adapting to life in the "new" South Africa.

The pacing of this novel sometimes felt "off" to me, but I found the setting and the story intriguing. When I'm looking for another fix of inspirational fiction, I'll gladly read another book by Vanessa del Fabbro.

Deborah's Story, by Ann Burton

2006-12-04T16:05:00.000-08:00

As some of you may know, I'm a bit of a connaisseur of Biblical fiction, and not just because I write the stuff myself. I initially shied away from Ann Burton's Women of the Bible series because of the rather romance-novel look of their packaging (oh, my prejudices!) but when she released a book on the prophetess Deborah at almost the same time my own Deborah book came out, I had to give her a try. (This curse of authors with bigger publishers and better distribution releasing novels on the same topic as mine at about the same time has dogged my career in Biblical fiction-writing, by the way -- see Tommy Tenney's and Rebecca Kohn's very different novels on Queen Esther. The only similarity between them was that they both came out at about the same time as mine. But let that rest for now).

I'm glad I didn't allow my prejudices to win out this time. Ann Burton is a fine writer who does a brilliant job of bringing Biblical women to life. Her ability to recreate time and place vividly is one of the strengths of her work, but she also imagines her Biblical women as believable characters. Her Deborah's backstory is very different from mine -- and the scope of her novel much narrower, taking place within a few short weeks rather than a span of years -- but I always find it intriguing to see the ways in which different writers can imagine the same character and story.

I enjoyed Burton's novels on Abigail and Jael even more than this one, and am looking forward to reading her Rahab novel. Yes, there are romance-novel conventions here -- the heroine invariably trembles when she glimpses the overwhelmingly handsome hero -- but they don't obscure good writing and rock-solid research that enables Burton to draw the reader into the world of a woman's life in ancient Israel.

One thing intrigues me: the books are well-promoted and distributed, but I can find no information online on the author -- no website, no interviews, no pictures, no blog. This makes me suspect Ann Burton may be a pseudonym. I can't imagine why such a talented writer would need a pseudonym for cover, but I'm interested in reading more of her work -- under any name.

The Secret Supper, by Javier Sierra

2006-12-04T15:40:00.000-08:00

Yet another novelist tries to ride Dan Brown's coat-tails to DaVinci-related fame ... and doesn't quite cut it, in my humble opinion. The novelist in this case is Spanish, and the novel is a translation into English, so perhaps it was the translation that didn't grab me. From a literary point of view, it's certainly no worse than The DaVinci Code, probably better -- but the one thing Dan Brown can do, shoddy research and all, is keep those pages turning, dragging even this reluctant reader along to the climax by the force of each chapter's cliffhanger ending.

I never even did figure out who all the characters were in The Secret Supper, and I found the novel's Leonardo unbelievable as an artist. The book never grabbed me -- instead of finding it impossible to put down, I kept forgetting to pick it up. If you're absolutely crazy for heresies and conspiracies, and enjoy a historical setting, you might want to give this a try -- but Dan Brown can sleep soundly on his million-dollar sheets for now. No serious competition here.

Domino, by Maura Hanrahan

2006-10-15T14:44:00.000-07:00

You might want to refer to my recent review of Jonathan Harr's The Lost Painting for a refresher on my relationship with non-fiction. While I always prefer a novel, I am getting better at reading non-fiction that is both informative and engaging. Domino definitely falls into this category, as Maura Hanrahan does her usual deft job of bringing Newfoundland history to life.

The scene this time is the Labrador summer fishery in the year 1885, when deadly storms crippled much of the Newfoundland fishing fleet and resulted in the loss of many lives. Hanrahan does a beautiful job of recreating this place and time, including many vivid characters. We meet Labrador "liveyers" and Newfoundland fishermen and their families, as well as the merchants and shipping captains who profited from the fishery.

Unlike many non-fiction writers, Maura Hanrahan understands that people like to read about people, so she focuses her story around a few vividly realized characters through whose eyes we experience the tragedies of 1885. Domino kept me turning pages and, as with The Lost Painting, I was left with the feeling that I had been both entertained and educated: taken into a world I didn't know much about and made to feel at home there.

High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby

2006-10-15T14:32:00.000-07:00

Man, I love Nick Hornby. I have this little problem I've mentioned before about novels written by men. I don't try to be sexist in my reading, but when it comes to contemporary and historical fiction (fantasy, sci-fi, all nonfiction excepted -- there are some great male writers in those areas) I find it hard to get into books by guys, as a sweeping general rule.

Nick Hornby is the glowing exception. He writes so well, he ought to be a woman -- but he doesn't write at all like a woman. Or rather, he does. He writes about being a man, the way so many (most?) women writers write about being women. I find Hornby's characters, and his novels, funny, sad, real and insightful.

Amazing then, that the one Hornby novel I hadn't read was his first bestseller, High Fidelity. I'd seen the movie with John Cusack years ago (I won't sidetrack here into how much I love John Cusack, but you should know I'm tempted to digress!) I have finally remedied this shortcoming and am here to report on the results.

If you, like me until recently, are one of the few people who haven't read High Fidelity, it's a completely believable (to me, anyway) journey into the mind of a thirty-something man who suffers from the classic "inability to commit" in relationships. The main character, Rob, isn't happy about anything in his life, and his discontent with himself leads him to do some pretty unpleasant things in his love life. (Not horribly unpleasant. Just jerk-like). It's hard to feel anything but contempt for Rob, yet by the end you do feel some kind of sympathy, too -- and a bit of hope.

Great book -- lots of laughs, lots to think about. Now I think I've read all Nick Hornby's novels and I need a new one. Get busy there Nick!

The Lost Painting, by Jonathan Harr

2006-10-15T13:55:00.000-07:00

I was confused about this book. Everything from the cover blurbs to the introduction made me assume this was a novel -- one of those "Adventures in Research" stories I like so much, but about art instead of literature. Then I got a couple of chapters in and realized ... this was non-fiction.

Those who know my reading habits well know that I'm primarily a fiction reader. When I pick up non-fiction, it's often a memoir, so there's still a strong narrative line to carry me through. A book like The Lost Painting reminds me of all the reasons why reading nonfiction can be great.

The book tells about the art historians involved in the quest for a lost Caravaggio painting called The Taking of Christ. Harr's descriptions and characterizations are so vivid that the story is as engrossing as a novel, while delivering a huge amount of information about art history and the process of restoring old paintings. He takes a subject about which I knew nothing and educates while entertaining. The Lost Painting was a thoroughly enjoyable read and I highly recommend it, even to those, like me, who know little about art.

Around the World in 80 Dates, by Jennifer Cox

2006-09-26T13:01:00.001-07:00

The premise of Around the World in 80 Dates is irresistible. Jennifer Cox, a divorced, late-thirties travel writer, tires of her unsuccessful love life and busy work life in London, and decides to go on a round-the-world trip to meet her Soul Mate, setting up (roughly) 80 dates with men in different countries along the way. Fortunatly, Cox writes with just the right tone of breezy, self-deprecating humour to keep this admittedly narcissisitc adventure from becoming cloying or annoying.

80 Dates is really a memoir that does four things at once. First, it tells the story it purports to tell: Jennifer's world trip and the 80 (give or take a few) guys she dates along the way. Second, it explores the concept of true love and finding a "soul mate" -- several of her "dates" are actually more for the purpose of exploring the other's persons ideas about love and relationships than they are about finding a potential partner for herself. Third, Jennifer Cox never forgets she's a travel writer: there are fascinating descriptions of nearly every place she visits, including the Burning Man festival in the US, where she meets ... well, I'll let you read that part. But I won't be giving away more than the dedication does if I tell you that, fourth, this book is also a love story. It's one thing to circle the world looking for a soul mate, but what do you do if you actually find one? Or ... more than one?

Just to be pedantic, Cox does fudge a bit on the definition of "dates." A day spent at Jim Morrison's grave does not, in my mind, qualify as a "date" with Morrison. Nor, if you're a straight woman looking only for men, does lunch with 20 lesbians, however enjoyable, qualify as one of your 80 dates. Unless you're really, really anxious to fill your quota.

Of course, the one huge unanswered question is: how did Cox fund all this travel? It's one thing to say most people are slaves to their jobs and don't have the leisure to devote to finding and maintaining quality relationships -- but also, most of us don't have the kind of careers that allow us to leave the office for a year and travel the world in search of the perfect mate. Obviously she continued travel writing in order to finance the trip, but I also wondered if she had a contract for the book, and an advance, before she set out? If so, did her potential Soul Mates know they were also potential characters in a memoir? And to what extent does the awareness of being observed change the experiment?

Despite my quibbles I found Around the World in 80 Dates an very enjoyable read and recommend it to readers, who are interested in world travel and relationships, even if we may not all get to combine them to quite the degree Jennifer Cox did!

The Midwife's Song, by Brenda Ray

2006-09-26T13:01:00.000-07:00

Rarely have I wanted to like a book as much as I wanted to like The Midwife's Song. I enjoy Biblical fiction anyway -- since I write it myself -- and for a long time Brenda Ray's novel has been Amazon.com's "Better Together" selection to go along with my own Esther: A Story of Courage. There are some good reviews on Amazon for it, so I looked forward to finally reading it. While I wasn't crushed with disappointment or anything, the novel was nowhere near as good as I expected it to be.

It's a great concept. Ray picks up on the Bible's fleeting reference to the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, who lurk in the background of the Baby-Moses-in-the-bulrushes story (Exodus 1:15-21), and gives Puah, her main character, a story of her own. As Ray herself worked as a nurse-midwife, I expected midwifery to be front and centre in this novel. Although the author had clearly done her research, I would have liked to see a lot more of it -- to learn surprising things that would make me think, "I didn't know a midwife in ancient Egypt would have done that!" There wasn't enough, for me, of that sense of discovery of an unknown world.

That same criticism could be applied to the book as a whole. The characters' outlook and motives often seemed anachronistically modern to me: I never felt convinced that I was being drawn into the world of Hebrew slaves in Egypt, nor was there much detail to help the reader grasp the reality of what a life in slavery would have meant at that time. Instead, there's far too much (for my money) of romance-novel-convention in the romance between Puah and the goldsmith Hattush -- seemingly endless descriptions of how handsome Hattush is and how Puah's heart races whenever he's around, etc etc. I guess I prefer my romance with more subtlety.

That said, Brenda Ray has brought to life a Biblical character that, as far as I know, no-one's written about before, and I think many Christian and Jewish women will enjoy this novel from that perspective without being as critical as I'm being. Ray does make one very gutsy narrative move towards the end of the novel that managed to surprise me, and I'm always pleased when an author can do that. This is a nice piece of Biblical fiction, but I personally would have preferred a little more meat with my manna.

Declare, by Tim Powers

2006-09-26T12:59:00.000-07:00

Every so often circumstances conspire to make me read a book I would never have picked up on my own. This month's book club selection for the Ship of Fools book club was Tim Powers' Declare, a kind of espionage-fantasy hybrid. Now, fantasy I love, but espionage? Spies? Books about people whose entire lives are lived in deceit and danger, caught in a web of intrigue so complex I am lost by page four and have to keep flipping back to see who's who?

Not my thing.

However, the book was so highly recommended by Shipmate LynnMagdaleneCollege, who was leading the discussion, that I decided I'd give it a try. The basic premise of Declare is that super-secret agent Andrew Hale becomes involved in a dangerous operation on Mount Ararat, combating ancient supernatural powers who live up there and who affect the fate of nations in Cold-War Europe. Well, that's one level of what the book is about anyway. It also revolves around Hale's relationship with two other characters, his long-time (but mostly unrequited) love, fellow-spy Elena, and real-life spy Kim Philby. For some readers (who actually care about this kind of thing) the most intriguing thing about the novel will be the fictional backstory that Powers weaves around the factual experiences of Philby, an odd enough character even in real life.

There is a strong core of Christian faith at the centre of this offbeat and hard-to-categorize novel, and that's what pulled me forward even when I couldn't figure out what side anyone was working for or who was double-crossing whom. The fantasy and religious elements kept me going even when the spy stuff was hard slogging. Reading Declare was certainly not enough to win me over to enjoying spy novels, but if I had to read one spy novel in my life, I'm glad this was this one.

The Bitch Posse, by Martha O'Connor

2006-09-26T12:55:00.000-07:00

First up, Martha O'Connor is a brilliant writer. No question about that. Second, The Bitch Posse isn't for everyone. I know a wide variety of people read this blog, and -- let's just say that if you find the title offensive, you won't like the inside any better.

The Bitch Posse is a dark, raw, often graphic and disturbing book about three teenage girls caught in a web of self-destructive behavior, whose close friendship may be their salvation -- or their downfall, depending on whose perspective you take. The novel follows the same three women into their later lives as they deal with the consequences of their adolescent rebellion. One character's life has completely fallen apart, while the other two seem, on the outside, to be living successful lives while inwardly dissolving into chaos.

All three women -- and girls -- are strong and well-drawn characters, and it's impossible not to get caught up in their unhappy lives. I raced through the book, completely engaged even when I was distrubed and repelled. I didn't exactly identify with any of the characters (although in a way I felt Wren/Rennie, the only-marginally-successful writer and teacher, could have been me in a life horribly gone wrong), but the novel made me reflect on the young girls I work with and how close this story seems to their experience. Reading this book dovetailed neatly (though uncomfortably) with my thoughts about the Dawson College shootings in Montreal this month. There's a lot here to think about, a lot to make readers uneasy and uncomfortable. The author warns readers up front that this book is not chicklit, and she's being straight with us.

As a chocolate-lover I'm always on the lookout for good dark chocolate. The other day I saw a bar that advertised itself as 99% cocoa. I didn't buy it. I think that chocolate bar might have been a bit like The Bitch Posse -- undeniably high-quality, but a little too dark and bitter for some of us.

The Dying Days, by Shannon Patrick Sullivan

2006-09-15T05:23:00.000-07:00

I would never have known about The Dying Days if Shannon Patrick Sullivan hadn't posted a comment here on Compulsive Overreader, which just proves blogging is good for something. At least, I might have heard of the book (after all, it was published by Creative/Killick, a local press with whom I have more than a passing familiarity), but I might not have realized that Sullivan's debut novel is a fast-paced, action-packed fantasy novel set right here in St. John's, Newfoundland. Once I knew that, how could I resist?

The Dying Days was a thoroughly enjoyable read. The Everyman protagonist, Christopher Prescott -- a PhD student recovering from a bad breakup -- unwittingly stumbles into a shadow world of people who exist on the fringes of "normal" St. John's society -- magic-users, keepers of ancient memories and almost-forgotten ways. A chance encounter brings Christopher right into the heart of the world of the Five Clans at a moment of crisis in both his own life and the life of that society -- and both emerge changed forever.

The Dying Days never lets up on the action. The entire story takes place over one weekend, packing an almost impossible schedule of near-death encounters and life-threatening incidents into less than three days. This sometimes requires leaps of plot that strain credibility a little (of course, I realize that once you're reading fantasy you're already suspending disbelief, but a couple of things happen in the novel that seemed unlikely even within the carefully-established world of the story). Mostly, though, the hectic keeps the pages turning. I had a chapter and a half to finish when I left for work this morning and I was compelled to bring the book with me, finishing it up while my students wrote a test. For a gal who doesn't normally get into suspense, this was pretty engaging.

The Dying Days isn't perfect, but it's very good. The writing is normally clear, competent and unfussy, but it's occasionally sloppy, and there are a few grammatical quirks that an editor should have fixed -- as well as a few quirks, like giving all the characters street names for surnames, that may not be wrong as such, but just irritated me. On the other hand, there are places where Sullivan's prose becomes positively lyrical, especially in two chapters where the point of view shifts rapidly around between characters, offering a series of brief, poignant and lovely vignettes.

Although I was intrigued by the plot, two things really sold The Dying Days for me. One was the engaging warmth of the main character, a young man who is very easy to identify with. The reader feels pulled right along on Christopher's journey, and he's an enjoyable travelling companion. In many ways the story is a personal quest for Christopher, and we see how he learns and changes over the novel's short span of time.

The other beauty of The Dying Days is the loving detail with which the city of St. John's is rendered. Bowring Park, especially, gets the fictional treatment it truly deserves. The passage in which Christopher, travelling on a plane of existance that contains the memories of both past and present, looks down on St. John's harbour crowded with ships from the centuries past, is so beautiful it almost made me cry. It's always good to read a good fantasy novel, but for me, it's especially great to read a novel whose author seems to love this city almost as much as I do.

The Big Over Easy, by Jasper Fforde

2006-09-15T05:21:00.000-07:00

The Big Over Easy is the first book in the new "Nursery Crime" series by Jasper Fforde, the almost unbelievably witty and inventive author of The Eyre Affair and other books featuring the time-travelling literary operative Thursday Next.

I think Jasper Fforde is one of those authors you just "get" or you don't. If you don't enjoy his particular convoluted humour packed full of literary and cultural references and in-jokes, there's no point trying to learn to like it. If, on the other hand, you like one Jasper Fforde, you'll probably like them all. I enjoyed the Thursday Next books so much I was a little wary to immerse myself in Fforde's new world, but Jason's review was so enthusiastic I knew I'd probably enjoy it.

And I did. Jack Spratt is the main character here, an unsuccessful detective in the Nursery Crime division, investigating the death of Humpty Dumpty -- was he pushed? Did he jump? (Yes, this is essentially the same set-up as Robert Rankin's The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse, which I haven't read though two of my students last year raved about it. Apparently the two books are, despite the obvious similarity, quite different in their takes on the classic nursery crime). In fact something much weirder than either fate happened to Humpty, but while the books hangs together as a whodunit, the real pleasure is in the humour, and in the slightly twisted modern-day England Fforde creates. As with the Thursday Next books, this is a world where literature dominates culture (every English major's dream world, in fact). Detectives in The Big Over Easy are judged not so much by their success at solving crimes as in how brilliantly and flamboyantly their cases conform to the standards of popular detective fiction -- when Jack Spratt's sidekick, Mary Mary, is interviewing for a job, the first question she's asked is, "And have you published?" The conventions of classic mysteries and the world of Mother Goose nursery rhymes provide endless fodder for Ffordian puns and in-jokes. I loved every minute of it and can't wait to get into the next book in the series, The Fourth Bear.

Between, Georgia by Joshilyn Jackson

2006-08-28T12:39:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Joshilyn Jackson -- not just of her fabulous debut novel gods in Alabama but also of her blog, one of the wittiest spots in cyberspace. Her second novel, Between, Georgia, is just one more reason to love this Southern writer who combines sass and sweetness in the perfect proportion.

Jackson's writing is wickedly funny and perceptive, and imbued with a strong sense of place. Writers from the Southern United States seem to have that same ability to immortalize their region in fiction that we here in Newfoundland value in our writers, so I'm in awe of the way Jackson brings a small Georgia town and its characters to life. At the centre of the story is Nonny Frett, caught in a family feud between her two very different families and the powerful matriarchs at the head of each. Nonny's caught "in-between" in her own life as well, unable to step forward to make the decisions she knows she has to make. In the course of the novel, the feud erupts into all-out war, and in the midst of battle Nonny finds within herself the resources to take charge of her own life.

While this novel lacks the darker edge that made gods in Alabama so compelling, it offers more than enough to engage and delight any reader who enjoys a smart, funny, heartwarming contemporary novel. Jackson's characterization is deft and insightful, even with the most minor characters. Here, for example, is a sentence describing a character who mkaes a half-page appearance in the novel:

"His name was Danny, but he had recently joined a band and was trying to make everyone call him Banger."

One sentence tells us all we'll ever need to know about Banger; Jackson's touch is virtually always this sure.

Between, Georgia is also, to me, a profoundly spiritual novel, just as gods in Alabama was. Mind you, it contains plenty of "mature language and situations" and certainly wouldn' t make the shelves of most Christian bookstores, but at its heart this novel has the same theme gods had, the theme that resonates with me more than any other: Grace happens. In unexpected places and through unexpected channels, but grace happens. Even in Between, Georgia.

Shaman's Crossing, by Robin Hobb

2006-08-28T08:30:00.000-07:00

I've done a lot of good reading this summer, but it's been a long time since I've read any good fantasy. I love good fantasy, and there's a lot of it out there, but not a lot that I really enjoy and can get into. Tastes in fantasy seem to be even more individual and specialized than in other types of fiction, because I've often had fellow fantasy readers tell me, "Oh, if you like X, you're sure to like Y," recommending a writer and a series of books -- only to have it fall completely flat for me. So when I stumble across a fantasy writer I do love, I hope that he or she is prolific.

Robin Hobb certainly fits the bill. Her last three trilogies could perhaps be called a "nonology," since all nine books are set in the same world and share some interlocking themes and characters. I've never read the original Assassin trilogy because I couldn't get it locally (although I have now ordered it from Amazon), but I did read the Liveship and Tawny Man trilogies and thoroughly enjoyed them. Hobb creates believable characters you can really care about in fully realized and interesting fantasy worlds, and then sets in motion plots that leave you turning pages till two a.m.

Her tenth book is a departure, set in what appears to be an entirely different world -- in the country of Gernia, where society is rigidly stratified and everyone appears to be pretty much settled in and accepting of their assigned role in life. The main character, Nevare Burvelle, is the second son of a nobleman, and thus destined to be a soldier -- a destiny Nevare doesn't question. Second sons are soldiers; that's just the way it is.

But Nevare's path to becoming his family's soldier son becomes fraught with twists and turns when his father sends him, as a teenager, to an old enemy for training. The repercussions of what happen during those weeks continue to haunt him for years, even when he leaves home at eighteen to go to military academy, where he makes lifelong friends and enemies and becomes caught up in webs of politics and intrigue.

I have read several bad reader review of this book on Amazon, from Hobb fans who were disappoitned and found that this first novel in a new trilogy was slow and didn't seem to go anywhere. Again, tastes vary, but I have to wonder if they were reading the same book I was reading. While introducing us to a whole world and a host of characters -- with minor characters as vivid and memorable as some of the major ones -- she moves the reader through Nevare's early life in a storyline that may seem episodic but in fact continues to build towards the inevitable climax at the context. I found it completely satisfying, maybe the book I've enjoyed most all summer.

It also contains one of the most thought-provoking passages I've read recently. Nevare is speaking of an experience so disturbing that he deals with it by pushing it aside and deciding it was just a dream.

"I think it is how most men get from one day to the next: they set aside all experiences that do not mesh with their perception of themselves. How different would our perception of reality be if, instead, we discarded the mundane ebvents that cannot coexist with our dreams?"

The next book in this series, Forest Mage, is due to be released in September. I'll be eagerly awaiting another fine book from Robin Hobb.

The Last Days of Dogtown, by Anita Diamant

2006-08-23T12:58:00.000-07:00

One of my many soft spots is for towns and villages that have ceased to exist -- the resettled Newfoundland outports, the "ghost towns", the places that time passed by. (I cried during Cars when they played the song "Our Town" over the montage showing the decline of the town. I cry at Springsteen's My Hometown). I thought I might cry over The Last Days of Dogtown, Diamant's novel about a dying New England town and the last residents who cling to the place.

Set in the early 1800s, The Last Days of Dogtown is not really a novel as much as a collection of linked short stories. No single narrative drive moves the book forward; instead we are introduced to a motley crew of desperate and eccentric characters -- some who live on in Dogtown, some who leave it for more up-and-coming places but retain some of the town's spirit in them.

At first I thought the cast of characters was too eccentric, and their fates too depressing, for me to become really engaged with the book. However, as it went on, I found that the book, and its characters, grew on me. I did care about them and was happy to see that some, at least, found happy endings. What didn't become real for me was the fate of Dogtown itself -- perhaps because there was no glimpse of what it might have been like as a living, thriving community. Diamant's book honours the passing of a town -- Dogtown was, in fact, a real place, though Diamant's stories of its residents are more imagination than history -- but, for me, failed to make that passing genuinely moving. Which is to say, I didn't cry.

Saving Fish from Drowning, by Amy Tan

2006-08-08T16:18:00.000-07:00

Just as it's easy for an actor to become "typecast" after playing a certain type of role, it's easy for a writer to become associated with a particular type of book. Some writers are quite comfortable with their role, while others constantly make us question what "kind" of writer they are by trying something different with each book. Every so often, a writer who has become known for a specific type of book breaks the mold by going in a completely different direction. Results vary. Some readers are happily surprised; others are disappointed.

Amy Tan has become successful and well-known as a writer of intimate, observant fiction about Chinese and Chinese-American women. Her novels often focus on mother-daughter relationships, and on the immigrant experience. Saving Fish from Drowning is a striking departure from such earlier works as The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife, and I admire Tan for trying something so different.

Saving Fish is Tan's own Cantebury Tales: a novel about twelve Americans on an ill-fated tour of Burma, narrated by the woman who organized the tour but unfortunately died before the trip took place. The dead woman, Bibi Chen, is able to be a completely omniscient narrator as she can now see into the thoughts of all her friends as well as the people they encounter along the way. The tourists disappear from the world's view after they meet up with members of a remote tribe who believe that one of the tour group is the promised savior of their people -- but Bibi sees what's happening both at home and abroad, and reports on the whole story.

This novel plays with many ideas -- especially the responsibility of outsiders confronted by a repressive regime like that of Burma/Myanmar. It also plays with our concepts of truth and fiction, a game that begins in the intriguing and deceptive preface to the novel. Most importantly, though, it introduces twelve distinct and intriguing main characters and allows their stories to weave in and out throughout a funny but also very serious tale.

I have read some bad reviews of Saving Fish from Drowning, with a common complaint being that Tan is just too ambitious here and the novel doesn't adequately deal with all the problems it creates. I really enjoyed it. I got very caught up in the stories of the twelve tourists -- none of whom is wholly likable but all of whom become very real and sympathetic throughout the story -- as well as the story of the tribal people who end up "kidnapping" them. I was pulled forward, propelled by curiousity about what happened, towards a conclusion that mixes happy endings, tragedy, and the sense that life goes on even after catastrophe and cataclysm. Count me in as one reader who is glad Amy Tan moved outside her writerly comfort zone to try something different.

An interesting interview with Tan about the novel is posted here, although if you plan to read the book you should be aware that it contains spoilers.

This Much is True, by Tina Chaulk

2006-07-31T06:44:00.000-07:00

this much is true is the second of two novels by local authors that I brought along on my trip with me, and I finished it on the plane on the way to England -- so the first thing I can say is that it's a quick read! (Of course, it's also a long flight!)

Tina Chaulk's first novel is deceptively funny and breezy, contrasting 22-year-old Lisa's letters home to her parents in Aspen Cove, Newfoundland, with the everyday reality of her life as a job-hunting university graduate in Toronto. Much of the humour comes from this contrast: Lisa is determined to put the best face on her experiences for the folks at home, but the reality of life in hot, crowded Toronto, working dead-end jobs and living with an old friend who has undergone a radical image change, is much darker than the cheery picture Lisa paints in her letters.

The novel reads like chicklit, but I say it's "deceptively" light because Lisa encounters some very serious and painful situations during her years in Toronto, even though humour is never far from the surface. Chaulk balances the humour and the heartbreak nicely and leaves you really caring for the characters.

The one fault I found in this much is true is with the language -- there are places where I felt the use of language was careless, and could have used better editing, especially in the dialogue, which sometimes sounds stilted. Lisa's narrative voice leaps off the page with such energy that it's sometimes a letdown when her voice, and those of the other characters, doesn't come through as clearly in the dialogue. However, I highly recommend this much is true as a quick read that will leave you laughing but also provide a few moments of serious reflection. I'm looking forward to reading more from Tina Chaulk.

The Sweet Edge, by Alison Pick

2006-07-31T06:20:00.000-07:00

Among my bundle of books to take to England (which turned out to be woefully inadequate as I'm such a fast reader) I included two recent novels by Newfoundland authors, one of which was Alison Pick's The Sweet Edge. This is a short and spare novel about a twentysomething couple, Ellen and Adam, whose relationship has gone awry after three years together. They spend the summer apart, Ellen working at a boring job in a city she doesn't like and Adam taking a long-dreamed-of canoe trip alone into the Canadian North.

That summary pretty much tells you what's annoying about these characters, neither of whom I liked much at the beginning of the novel. Adam is the poster boy for Self-Absorbed Jerks Afraid of Committment, while Ellen is typical of the kind of woman I meet so often in novels and so rarely in real life: passive, indecisive, a bystander in her own life.

Things change during the novel, however. Adam's trip up North is the classic man-against-the-wilderness-finding-yourself journey, but there are twists he hasn't forseen: the trip forces him to confront his own weakness and his need for other people. Meanwhile, Ellen goes on her own journey of self-discovery without ever leaving Toronto, though she does travel around it quite a bit. Her voyage is made not in solitude but in community; the group of new friends who help Ellen "find herself" are among the most engaging characters in the book. In the end, then, the book accords well with my own recent musings about "finding yourself" on a journey: community is as important as solitude in self-discovery, if not more so.

Starting out by disliking the major characters is not usually a good sign for a book but by the end of The Sweet Edge I found myself caring about Ellen and Adam in spite of their flaws. I was interested to see how Pick would end the novel and I wasn't disappointed (though a bit frustrated by a detail that, in a very postmodern way, is left hanging at the end).

The language is one of the delights of The Sweet Edge. I'm not always keen on novels by poets (Pick is best-known as a poet and recent winner of the prestigious CBC literary award for poetry) because too often the language takes centre stage, leaving plot and characters to fend for themselves. Here, however, Pick's subtly elegant prose is always used in the service of the story, so that you never forget you're reading a novel -- a very well-written novel, but not one that screams, "Look at my prose! How lovely it is!" Rather, we're drawn to look through the clear window of Pick's prose into the lives of two people who are flawed and fallible, but who are also able to change.

Labyrinth, by Kate Mosse

2006-07-31T03:32:00.000-07:00

Labyrinth has all the obvious ingredients for a Book Trudy Should Love. It's an adventure-in-research, with a volunteer on an archeological dig making a discovery that suddenly has a lot of sinister people interested in either recovering, or covering up, a centuries-old secret. Strong female characters -- 13th-century Alais and the modern-day Alice who may be her reincarnation -- are at the centre of this novel. It also has both history and religion (it focuses on the Albigensian Crusade in southern France), and even labyrinths! What's not to like?

Well, nothing, but sadly there wasn't much here to really fall in love with either. The story is well-executed and kept me turning the pages, but for some reason I was not drawn in to the novel the way I would like to have been. The main characters never became compelling enough for me -- perhaps because there were so many characters that even in 600+ pages I felt there was too much going on to keep track of. Normally I like long books, but I felt that the payoff at the end of this one was not entirely worth it -- I expected a labyrinthine complexity of plot but this somehow fell flat. There are plenty of plot threads going on and they do tie together, but the emotional impact that would make it all meaningful seemed (to me) to be lacking.

Put it this way: I bought the book to read in England, and it was so bulky it was hard to fit into our luggage. So I decided to leave it in the hotel room, because I knew I probably wouldn't be rereading it. It's by no means a bad book, but given the ingredients at hand, it didn't add up to as much as I'd expected.

Rashi's Daughters: Joheved, by Maggie Anton

2006-07-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

Like far too many Christians, I would have to confess that my knowledge of Judaism pretty much left off where the Bible ended and picked up with the Holocaust, with no real sense (despite my history degree and broad reading) of what Jews were doing for the 2000 years in between, except wandering around without a homeland and getting persecuted by bad Christians. Until a couple of years ago, I wouldn't have recognized the name of Rashi, the most famous medieval commentator on the Talmud (or even have been able to explain exactly what the Talmud was).

I still wouldn't say I know a lot about, say, medieval European Judaism, but I've become much more curious and interested in filling in this gap in my historical knowledge, which is why I eagerly picked up Maggie Anton's first volume in her series Rashi's Daughters: Joheved.

The series does what it says on the tin: it brings to life the family of Rashi (Salomon Ben Isaac, as he was known in his lifetime), devout Jews living in France in the eleventh century, through the characters of the women in the family. The oldest daughter is studious Joheved, who wants to study Talmud like a boy. Anton has done a wonderful job of recreating the time and place of the story, drawing us into a world that most readers, like me, probably know little about.

I do have quibbles with the book: Anton's knowledge of the period is so thorough and detailed that her research often jumps front and centre, drawing attention away from the characters and plot. The dialogue is often forced to carry the weight of heavy-handed exposition, which keeps the reader at arm's length. But despite these flaws, the first volume of Rashi's Daughters is well worth reading for its glimpses into women's lives in eleventh-century France, Jewish life at the period, and the role that Talmud study played in that life. I will be looking out for the next novel in this series.

The Beekeeper's Apprentice, by Laurie R. King

2006-07-15T09:56:00.000-07:00

My husband's thumbs-up on this book (which he gives with great enthusiasm) is probably more significant than mine, since Jason is the Sherlock Holmes fan in the family. The Beekeeper's Apprentice is the first in King's series of novels re-imagining the famous detective in retirement with an unlikely apprentice: an exceptionally brilliant young woman named Mary Russell with a mind as keen and analytical as Holmes' own.

I am not a huge mystery fan, though I do enjoy some of the classics. I have read all the original Sherlock Holmes stories, and I am a huge fan of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy Sayers. In some ways what Laurie King has done here is similar to what Jill Paton Walsh did in taking over the Lord Peter Wimsey series and writing new adventures for the great detective, but I think King's attempt is more successful, and I'll try to explain why.

First, there's the obvious fact that I'm a less stringent critic in this case than I was with the Wimsey novels: I am so intimate with Lord Peter (don't I wish!) that every nuance and tone is familiar to me, and rings false if it's "off" (which I frequently find it is in Jill Paton Walsh's version). Not being a rabid Sherlock Holmes fan, I'm less likely to be bothered by discrepancies between King's new version and the original Arthur Conan Doyle product. But King has also handled the issue of the narrator in a way that allows her to account for discrepancies: while the original Holmes stories were told from the point of view of Holmes' loyal sidekick, Dr. Watson, The Beekeeper's Apprentice uses Mary Russell as first-person narrator, and she tells the reader up front that she knew a different side of Holmes than Watson did, and so the way in which she depicts the great man is bound to differ somewhat.

The most appealing thing, to me, about The Beekeeper's Apprentice, is that both Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell are complete, well-rounded and fascinating characters who keep me completely engaged in the story. I'm much more of a character-driven than a plot-driven reader, which is why most mysteries don't appeal to me. Both Jason, who is more of a typical mystery reader, and I wanted to read more of these novels, and the next two in the series (A Monstrous Regiment of Women and A Letter of Mary) are packed in our bags waiting for our trip to England!

Masque of the Black Tulip, by Lauren Willig

2006-07-14T13:25:00.000-07:00

Having just talked about how much I like those "Adventures in Research" novels (below) I figured I'd definitely like Lauren Willig's novel about a history grad student chasing down information about French and English spies in the era of the Napoleonic Wars. The story alternates between the grad student and the historical characters she's researching.

I didn't realize till after I had this home that it's a sequel to Willig's earlier novel, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, but I didn't find it hard to pick up the threads. It's a light, easy read, kind of Adventures-in-Research-meets-chicklit. I was 3/4 of the way through before I realized that the sticker on the spine of the book said "Romance." I hadn't realized this was marketed as a romance novel; the fact that it was, means that I had taken Brenda Coulter's read-a-romance-novel challenge without knowing I was doing it!

Actually, once I knew it was a romance novel (and a much smarter novel than I usually think of romances as being) some of the things that had bothered me about the novel began to bother me less. There's a definite fluffiness to Willig's tone and a lack of depth to the characterization which makes more sense in genre fiction than in something intended for the so-called literary end of the bookstore. (Why this should be so is, of course, a whole other topic). The fluffiness bothered me more in the historical sections of the story (which take up the bulk of pages in this novel). While the details of the Regency setting were all there, something about the characters' tone and attitude seemed oddly modern -- like 20th-century chicklit transported to a Regency English drawing room. I'm not saying that if you write about that era you have to imitate the style of Jane Austen, but the reader should believe that your characters are actually living in that era and thinking as people of that era do, and I wasn't convinced of that with Willig's historical characters. That being said, while some of the unintentional anachronisms are annoying, there are also a few obviously intentional anachronisms which I found hilarious.

Anyway, it appears I'm willing to cut a book much more slack after I see a few hearts on the spine sticker, because once I started thinking of it as a smart historical romance novel, I was able to stop criticizing and enjoy The Masque of the Black Tulip for the light, amusing romp it is. I would definitely read both the book that came before and the planned next book in the series -- The Deception of the Emerald Ring -- even if it means being seen in the romance section of the library!

Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land, by John Crowley

2006-07-03T17:07:00.000-07:00

There's a subgenre of fiction that could best be described as "adventures in research," which almost always hooks me at first glance. Basic plot of an Adventure in Research -- a scholar, or a pair or small group of scholars, discovers an ancient and forgotten manuscript, or clues that point to the possibility of an ancient and forgotten manuscript, or a historical mystery somehow linked to an ancient manuscript. They then drop everything and run around the world searching for it, piecing together the clues to a discovery that will revolutionize literature, or theology, or history itself. Along the way the scholars usually have to work out their own relationship and/or resolve some personal issues.

Adventures in Research novels range from the wildly successful and critically acclaimed Possession by A.S. Byatt (one of my personal favourites) to the wildly successful and critically derided Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (not one of my personal favourites) and also include such gems as the vastly under-appreciated Gospel by Wilton Barnhardt (probably in my all-time Top Ten favourite books). The genre often pleases me with books that are relatively good though not great (Chasing Shakespeares, by Sarah Smith, or Ex Libris by Ross King) and sometimes disappoints me with books that simply don't deliver (Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian was one such for me).

With all this in mind (and despite my ingrained prejudice against male authors), Lord Byron's Novel was an easy sell for me when I picked it up in the library the other day. I had heard nothing about the book nor read anything else by John Crowley, but I was immediately hooked by the premise: notes to a previously unknown Byron novel, annotated by his estranged daughter, are discovered -- but where is the novel itself?

This was definitely one of the most successful Adventures in Research I have read in a long time, even though there was much less chasing-the-manuscript-across-the-capitals-of-Europe than one generally expects in such a novel.

There are really three stories here: Byron's actual "lost novel" takes up most of the pages, and Crowley has done a wonderful job of creating the sort of gothic novel Lord Byron might actually have written, gloriously overwritten and full of Romantic punctuation and italics. The chapter notes give us a glimpse into the life and mind of his daughter Ada, who writes her commentary on the novel while dying of cancer and uses the experience to work through her complex feelings about her famous father. Finally, the researcher on the case explores not just the quest for Lord Byron's novel but also her own relationship with an estranged father through a series of emails to her father and her partner.

All three stories are vivid and compelling and kept me not just turning pages but also thinking. Crowley is brilliant with language, too -- from his ability to capture a Byronic narrative voice, to his nuanced appreciation for the different voices people use in email communication.

Here's a favourite quote from the novel: it occurs in a letter to the scholar, Alex, from her mother. It encapsulates something I'd never put into words before, but that as soon as I read it I thought, "That's absolutely true!" -- which is a gem to find in an already wonderful work of fiction:

"People say that troubles and grief can make you strong, but I don't believe it -- I think that love and happiness make you strong, they feed you and wrap your soul in healthy tissue...so you can stand things, and abide the cold."

Sweetness in the Belly, by Camilla Gibb

2006-06-28T05:07:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how to describe Sweetness in the Belly, except to say that you really have to read it. It was a book club selection at one of my favourite online hangouts, chicklit.com , and I was disappointed that I didn't get it from the library in time to have it read before author Camilla Gibb came online for a chat with readers. The library finally came through for me, and Sweetness in the Belly was well worth the wait.

This novel explores several interesting and little-known cultural niches through the eyes of a heroine who is a perpetual outsider: Lilly never really fits neatly anywhere. She's the child of wandering English hippies who leave her at a Muslim shrine in Morocco and then fecklessly get themselves killed, leaving her to grow up at the shrine. So this little white girl is raised by Sufi mystics in Morocco, then finds her way to Ethiopia and eventually to England, where she lives as an adult among Muslim refugees -- her own people, despite her white skin and English pedigree.

Camilla Gibb gives the Western reader a glimpse into a multifaceted Islamic world that is much more complex and nuanced than the oversimplified vision of Islam we often have in the West. We also get glimpses into Ethiopian history and politics that will probably be new and revelaing to many readers, as they were to me. But this is not a dry presentation of the author's research; rather, it's a compelling story told through the eyes of a woman we really care about. Lilly is a difficult, prickly, suspicious character who has been badly hurt and has had trouble moving on from her losses, but I found myself cheering for her (and the attractive Dr. Gupta!) every step of the way. Other characters -- including the two men Lilly loves, and the large cast of friends and acquaintances she meets along her journey -- are drawn just as deftly; even characters with bit parts are memorable and sometimes heartbreaking. I highly recommend this novel!

Deafening, by Frances Itani

2006-06-28T04:55:00.000-07:00

I became aware of Deafening when it was Maureen McTeer's selection for this year's round of Canada Reads. It's the story of a deaf woman, Grania, who lives in a small Ontario town at the beginning of the twentieth century. Grania loses her hearing at age five due to an illness, learns to lip-read and sign, goes to a school for the deaf, marries a hearing man, and waits at home for her husband, Jim, to return from the first World War.

That's about all the plot there is to Deafening. Even speaking as someone who doesn't like plot-driven novels and is quite happy with a "slow" book, I found Deafening a little too slow. I thought the information about what it was like to be a deaf woman 100 years ago was interesting, but while Itani created Grania's world well, neither Grania nor Jim nor any of the other characters ever became truly compelling to me. As a "woman on the home front" WWI novel, it still doesn't beat Rilla of Ingleside. I'm not sorry I read this book; it was somewhat interesting, but it never grabbed me as I'd hoped it would.

The Constant Princess, by Philippa Gregory

2006-06-27T02:47:00.000-07:00

Philippa Gregory is sticking with what works for her -- the Tudors. Though she has been a longstanding writer of historical fiction set in various eras, Gregory seems to have "made it big" a few years ago with her novel The Other Boleyn Girl (that would be Mary, who possibly got lucky with Henry VIII before her unfortunate sister Anne did). Next she tackled the court of Mary Tudor with The Queen's Fool, then produced a curiously weak-willed Elizabeth I in The Virgin's Lover. Now she's back with a novel about the early life of Katherine of Aragon.

I like Katherine of Aragon. You can't help feeling sorry for her, and admiring her incredible stubbornness, her determination to cling to what she believed was her right -- to be Queen of England, regardless of the fact that her husband was willing to change law, religion, and history to divorce her. Today, she'd probably hire a hotshot lawyer and end up with half of Hampton Court Palace, but back then her options were a little more limited -- however, she did the best she could.

But this -- is not that story. This is the story of how Katherine -- Catalina -- came from Spain to England to marry Henry's ill-fated older brother Arthur. In this historical debate about the Katherine-Arthur marriage, Gregory comes down firmly on the side of believing it was not only consummated, but was a passionate love affair that dominated the rest of Katherine's life. It's an interesting way to look at the story and Gregory sells it believably. I enjoyed this novel. I still am not willing to give Gregory a permanent spot in my historical fiction pantheon of goddesses (alongside Sharon Kay Penman and Margaret George) -- she sometimes strikes a false note, and there's a certain depth and resonance lacking -- but she's well up on the second tier, with another very readable story. Unlike The Virgin's Lover, in which she took one of the strongest women in history and reduced her to a girl who can't decide what to have for lunch unless Robert Dudley orders for her, in The Constant Princess Gregory takes one of the most tragic women in English history and creates a backstory for her that fits perfectly with everything we already know about Katherine of Aragon.

In the Company of the Courtesan, by Sarah Dunant

2006-06-27T02:36:00.000-07:00

Sarah Dunant's follow-up to her highly acclaimed historical novel The Birth of Venus is every bit as enjoyable, in my opinion. In the Company of the Courtesan tells the story of a Venetian courtesan of the sixteenth century, Fiammetta Bianchini, as told through the eyes of her male dwarf companion Bucino. I thought it was an intriguing and well-drawn glimpse into the world of that time and the lives of women who made their living at the upper-class end of the sex trade. The characters seemed a little distant at first, but as the story went on I realized I cared about them more than I'd thought I did. I was drawn gradually into the world of this story and of these characters. My favourite element is the relationship between Bucino and Fiammetta -- a lifelong bond that is not sexual, but is incredibly intimate and loving. Since I'm fascinated by stories that explore the dynamics of friendship -- which is to say, the dynamics of love that is not necessarily, or not primarily, erotic -- I really enjoyed that aspect of the novel.

Small Island, by Andrea Levy

2006-06-23T05:21:00.000-07:00

Cool. I figured out how to make the book cover pics bigger.

I had heard several good recommendations for Andrea Levy's Small Island but it took me awhile to get around to reading it. I'm glad I did. It's the story of a Jamaican couple who move to England in the 1940s and the English couple in whose house they live for a time. The structure of the novel was different from what I expected: I thought the story would begin with Hortense and Gilbert's arrival in England and continue to follow them throughout the years. Instead, it starts with their arrival in England and then goes into flashbacks to reveal each character's backstory -- how they got there.

I like when novels do this, because we have to re-evaluate our judgements of people based on their actions, once we get a glimpse into who they really are and what has shaped them. This novel does a brilliant job of making each of the four characters a living human being we really care about. It also vividly creates both Jamaica and postwar England as places we can see, touch, smell and taste -- and illuminates the contrast between them, the culture shock immigrants of that era must have experienced.

I wasn't happy with the ending of this book, but to explain why would involve spoilers, and the book is good enough that I don't want to spoil it for you. You might disagree with me about the ending: you will almost certainly enjoy the process of getting there.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See

2006-06-09T13:25:00.000-07:00

It's great when a book can transcend your pre-conceptions. I love historical fiction about woman, but if you had asked did I want to read a book about women's lives in nineteenth-century China, I would have said, "Probably not." However, I read a great review of this book by my online friend, writer Katrina Stonoff, so I decided to give it a try.

I'm glad I did, as Lisa See has done a wonderful job of evoking the lives of women who lived a completely restricted and enclosed existence. The story begins when the narrator, Lily, is almost old enough to have her feet bound -- and I can tell you that whatever you've heard about this practice in the past is nothing compared to the vivid description of a girl actually going through it. If you have a six-year-old daughter, as I do, it's almost painful to read this part of the novel, in which "mother love" is expressed through the brutal mutilation of her daughter's body.

Lily is not an entirely sympathetic or likable character, yet the reader is drawn into her mind and her world. The most important relationship of Lily's life is her arranged friendship with Snow Flower and their correspondence through nu shu, the secret writing taught only to women. Lily's choices have disastrous consequences for that friendship and for Snow Flower, yet we empathize with Lily as well as with Snow Flower, recognizing how limited women's choices were in that place and time. I highly recommend this compelling novel.

Riding the Bus with my Sister, by Rachel Simon

2006-06-09T13:17:00.000-07:00

This is a simple but memorable memoir about a professional woman in mid-life who has to come to terms with her relationship with her mentally retarded sister. Rachel agrees to spend a few days each month for one year riding the city buses with Beth -- this being Beth's favourite occupation. Along the way Rachel meets a lot of interesting characters, soaks in some homespun wisdom, and reflects on her own life path. All this might be a bit cliche, but what rescues it from being too saccharine is Rachel's uncompromising honesty about her own ambivalent feelings towards Beth. Rachel makes it clear that she has learned much from Beth and respects her sister on her own terms, but she also faithfully reflects the frustration and disappointment of dealing with a family member who isn't "normal." I read this book quickly and really enjoyed it. Apparently it was made into a TV movie last year, starring Andie McDowell and Rosie O'Donnell. I didn't see the movie, but based on the Amazon reviews I won't be rushing out to buy it. Read the book; don't wait for the movie.

Leaving the Saints, by Martha Beck

2006-06-09T03:18:00.000-07:00

I've been waiting for quite awhile to read this book, as it seemed to take forever to come into my library. I enjoyed Martha Beck's earlier memoir, Expecting Adam, when I read it last summer, and naturally I was interested in her account of how she parted ways with the Mormon church and also with her family, which was deeply involved with the church due to her father's status as a prominent LDS scholar and apologist.

I have many warm feelings towards the Latter-Day Saints, largely because we Seventh-day Adventists tend to get lumped together with Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses as "weird fringe religions." Knowing how easy it is to have your beliefs misunderstood, oversimplified, and caricatured, I don't like to see it being done to someone else. Plus, I've had a couple of good online LDS friends over the years who have given me a better understanding of their religion. So I wasn't interested in reading a "hatchet job" on the Mormons, but I was interested in Martha Beck's story of her own experience.

It's not a hatchet job, and she does try to be fair to her former religion, but readers certainly won't come away with an overwhelmingly positive impression of the LDS church. Primarily, it appears as a movement intolerant of diversity and dissent, which of course reflects Beck's own experience. Many things about the LDS subculture were things familiar to me as a still-practicing but ever-questioning SDA: while our doctrines are quite different, the sense of a very closed and self-referential subculture is similar. My sense is that there is much more openness in the SDA church but I'm keenly aware that that is putting my personal experience up against Martha Beck's: another SDA woman of my generation might have experienced our church as much more harsh and repressive, while I'm sure many of Martha Beck's contemporaries have found the LDS church far more open and tolerant than she found it to be.

Her alleged sexual abuse, which is at the core of this story, has been denied by members of her family. It's not something a reader can really make a judgement on the truth of, but she does tell the story in a very compelling way. Certainly I believed her while I was reading it. Beck writes with her usual warmth and energy, and a great deal more humour than I expected -- I laughed out loud often during this book, though in many cases the humour is at the expense of LDS doctrine and practice, so it was somewhat guilty laughter.

You may like this book or hate it, agree or disagree with Martha Beck, but she is (as always) an engaging writer, and many of the issues she raises about the LDS church will be familiar to anyone who grew up in a conservative religious environment.

An Audience of Chairs, by Joan Clark

2006-06-08T12:03:00.000-07:00

(This is the third time I've written this review because Blogger consumed the last two. I hope I'm getting more concise and pithy each time).

Joan Clark is a writer for whom I have great admiration, not just professionally but personally as she has always been most encouraging and gracious to me as a younger writer. So I awaited her latest novel, An Audience of Chairs, with much anticipation, and I was not disappointed.

An Audience of Chairs tells the story of Moranna, a Cape Breton woman who loses everything that matters in her life because of her mental illness. Moranna is a survivor, though, and makes her way back to a life she can live on her own terms -- even if those terms don't always make sense to others.

Joan Clark vividly draws us in to Moranna's inner world -- we can see how Moranna's choices and actions make perfect sense within her reality -- while at the same time giving us the bigger picture so we can see how frustrating and incomprehensible those actions are to the people around Moranna: her brother, her husband, her children. This is not only a beautifully written novel, but a penetrating fictional treatment of mental illness. Moranna is a haunting and engaging character who stayed with me long after I put the book down.

An Audience of Chairs won the Newfoundland Book Award for fiction. It richly deserved the award and I hope this novel wins many more prizes, as well as winning the hearts of many mroe readers.

The Wreckage, by Michael Crummey

2006-06-07T03:02:00.000-07:00

The Wreckage is one of the most acclaimed Newfoundland novels of the past year and was shortlisted for the Newfoundland Book Awards. It richly deserves the attention it's gotten, and more. I think of Michael Crummey first and foremost as a poet, but the problem I often have with novels by poets is that the beautiful language takes centre stage, pushing story and character to the margins. I even found this true, to some extent, in Crummey's first novel, River Thieves (though lots of people would disagree with me). In The Wreckage, though, Crummey has written a completely compelling novel that benefits from a poet's ease with language.
The Wreckage tells the story of Wish and Mercedes, a couple who meet as teenagers in a remote Newfoundland outport but are driven apart first by the religious prejudice of the community and then by the Second World War. The beautifully realized settings move from Fogo Island to St. John's to a Japanese POW camp -- and then back to modern-day St. John's as these "star-crossed lovers" finally cross paths again in old age. A very satisfying read.

Mean Boy, by Lynn Coady

2006-06-07T02:56:00.000-07:00

Lynn Coady's Mean Boy is a novel about a university student and would-be poet who falls under the spell of one of his writing teachers, who is not only an accomplished poet but also a wildly dysfunctional alcoholic (why do those two so often seem to go hand in hand?) Larry idolizes Jim, but during the course of a year at a New Brunswick university, he learns some things about idols with feet of clay, and also about his own weaknesses. This is a very funny book in places, but also a little dark and sad. I was glad I read it, but by the time I was finished I didn't want to spend a lot more time with these characters in their world. Nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

The Birth House, by Ami McKay

2006-06-06T13:39:00.000-07:00

I had the privilege of meeting Nova Scotia writer Ami McKay recently when we both read at a writers' festival in Halifax. This is a wonderful historical novel about Dora Rare, a midwife in rural Nova Scotia in the early years of the twentieth century, when "modern medicine" was beginning to push midwifery to the margins. Dora is a strong and memorable character, and McKay's insights into the world of midwives and of women in general during that era draw the reader right into Dora's world. And I'm sure every woman will be happy to learn there is a simply home remedy for hysteria! (little in-joke there for those who've read the book).

This is a test

2006-06-04T06:08:00.000-07:00

This is a test. A Test. A Test. I'm testing to see if I can set up my Book Review site, Compulsive Overreader, as a blog.