All Hail the Humble Book!

It's a Book
Written by Lane Smith
Published by Roaring Book Press

5 Out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Amanda

Dear Amazon Kindle,

Do you know what else is portable? Do you know what else allows me to read anywhere at any given time? Do you know what else I can read on a beach or in any light? Do you know what else has crisp black and white contrast for easy reading? Do you know what else I can fit in my purse? Do you? Do you?

A book.

I'm not a technology curmudgeon (although my use of the word "curmudgeon" alone probably indicates that I'm well on my doddering way into geriatric-ville). There have been many technological advances of which I'm quite fond--just try and pry my iPod out of my cold dead hand. However, when it comes to technology, I see two categories: 1) technology that saves time and adds to the quality of my life and 2) status technology. For the most part, I think e-readers and their ilk fall into status technology. It screams "hey, look at me and my nifty gadget." Sure you can download several books within seconds, but going to a bookstore and browsing through the selections with a cuppa joe in my hand is one of my favorite things. I like walking around, basket on my arm, adding to it any item that catches my fancy. I like agonizing over which of my carefully selected books will be going home with me as I weigh my wants against what my meager bank account will allow me to have. I love the feel of books, the smell of books, the covers of books. I love turning pages. I love seeing what others are reading.

And that's why I love It's a Book. In a world of techno-abundance, it reminds the jackasses of the world that the book is already perfection.

A Pretty Package, But Empty Inside

The Night Circus
by Erin Morgenstern
Published by Doubleday

3 Out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Amanda

The Night Circus reminds me of a wedding cake: breathtakingly beautiful and intricate, with an infinite amount of attention paid to every detail. And, while you'll do the polite thing and talk about how delicious it was, in your heart-of-hearts you know that the simple homemade cake you've got waiting for you at home is infinitely better. Because a wedding cake isn't really about taste at all; it's all about flash, panache, and aesthetics. As your fork breaks through all the magic of sculpted icing, what you often find is that it lacks flavor and texture. All the effort went into the external and not the internal. That's how I feel about The Night Circus. It is unquestionably beautiful in its descriptions of the enchanting black and white Circus of Dreams and connects with you on the level of a child's awe and wonderment at encountering a world where the possibility of magic is confirmed.  However, in the final analysis what is missing is a story full of conflict, tension, and developed characters. It's certainly pretty to look at, but didn't resonate with me.

The beginning of the book is filled with promise. Celia Bowen is delivered to her father, Prospero the Enchanter, after her mother commits suicide. Prospero is initially disinterested in the daughter he never knew nor wanted, but becomes intrigued when her anger manifests itself in the movement and breaking of objects in the room around her. Like her father, Celia has a gift for magic--a gift that her father uses to make a living as an illusionist, knowing that his audiences will never suspect what they witness on stage is real and not just sleight of hand. After training Celia to control her powers, Prospero contacts the mysterious Alexander, another true magician, and the two make a wager. Prospero will pit his daughter against an opponent of Alexander's choosing in a challenge that is never clearly defined to the reader. Alexander accepts and promptly plucks Marco, a boy with a love of reading, from a nearby orphanage and begins training him.


{a few spoilers ahead; those still interested in reading the book may want to stop here}


It's at this point that the book has a lot of promise and I'm actually getting excited about the challenge to come. This is also where problems start to surface. Several chapters segue into peripheral storylines not really deserving of exploration as they take the tension out of the challenge between the two magicians. But that's okay, because there's not a lot of tension there to begin with. Celia and Marco are trained for a challenge that's never defined for them. They don't know how the game is played (nor why) and they don't know who their opponent is. Hell, they don't even know what the challenge is until they've unknowingly been involved in it for a while. This is problematic because Celia and Marco have no reason to be invested in the challenge and neither does the reader as we, too, are kept in the dark in regard to all of these matters. It turns out that the challenge is the circus itself, designed specifically as a battleground for the two magicians and the challenge is basically to create additional tents of merriment and delight. That's it. No showdowns, no dramatic monologues, no tension, no pounding of wizard staffs, no ruthlessly executed tactical maneuvers. It's just "I think I'll make a pretty, pretty ice garden" followed by "Oh, he made a pretty, pretty ice garden. I think I'll make a really nifty wishing tree" and on and on it goes, where it stops nobody knows . . . or cares. To completely suck any tension out of this scenario, the two fall in love, which only heightens their disinterest in playing out the game. Their moves and countermoves actually become hidden messages to one another, tributes to the love that will never be.

All of this is not to say that I hated the book. I liked it and I could certainly appreciate the beauty of the descriptions. Some have compared it to Neil Gaiman, which I disagree with as Gaiman would have infused the story with sinister undertones, clever word play to catch the reader off-guard, and a gothic feel. What the book really needs are two magicians who know exactly who they are fighting and why they are fighting--and both of whom desperately want to win. Without that, it's just a tower of lovely icing that leaves you hungry for more than sugar and beauty in the end.

Perdita Durango es una mala mujer. Muy mala!

PERDITA DURANGO
Barry Gifford
Grove Press, 1996
reviewed by Anthony Vacca
5 out of 5 stars

Brief, brutal, and bizarre, Perdita Durango is my kind of pulp noir, and my kind of woman. A self-proclaimed Tex-Mex (Half American, Half Mexican) Perdita is also a thief, a whore, a killer, and an all-around sociopath. Skinny, lithe, and dangerous, this novel follows Perdita's misadventures after shacking up with Romeo Dolorosa, a Mexican drug dealer who fronts his border distribution racket with a church where he serves as voodoo high priest, sacrificing goats and chickens and sometimes even people.

In a lot of ways, this novel, also anthologized in the collection Sailor's Holiday under the title 59° and Raining, is the anti-Wild at Heart in that the previous novel was about a couple that represented the idea of love being something stronger than the chaos at the heart of the Americas, but here we have Perdita and Romeo as celebrants of death, two evil souls who see killing and fucking as essentially two sides of the same coin, the only real way to prove that you're alive.

Even the roadtrip trajectory of this novel mirrors the one Sailor and Lula took in Wild at Heart but instead of goinng to California to make a chance at a life together, our two Latin-flavored killers are transporting a truck-load of human organs that are to be used in a mafia-run illegal skincare scheme. Without giving away the particular sordid and disgusting contents of their cargo, know that it certainly only adds to the over-all theme of the complete disregard of life that we children of God are more than capable of perpetrating upon one another.

Gifford is in rare form here, carrying the free-wheeling, digressive narrative along quickly enough with cigarette-smoking-cool existential back-and-forths between its characters; these are the kind of deviants and delinquents who love to tell each other stories for the pure bliss of hearing the sounds of their own voices. The action is jarring and sparesly rendered in a way that reads almost like beat poetry that doesn't suck.

This novel (or novella, if we want to split hairs) can be read in a single sitting, as the chapters are short and charged with enough sex and violence to leave a throat dry and in serious need of a refreshing cervaza. It's a hell of a story, and like its eponymous femme fatale, it's bad. Very bad.

The Truth Goes Bone Deep

What's Bred in the Bone

Robertson Davies

Penguin

Reviewed by: Terry
5  out of 5 stars

This is Robertson Davies’ best book. No, really it is. And he’s written some pretty awesome ones, let me tell you. Certainly, at the very least, I can say that this one is my favourite. It has everything I want and expect from a book by Davies: a concentration on artistic and intellectual matters, exploration into the ways in which heredity and upbringing shape the soul of an individual, characters who are both ‘realistic’ and odd, witty insights into human nature and foibles at both the individual and communal level, and a preoccupation with myth as it surfaces in our everyday lives through both obvious and not so obvious avenues; in short a heady rumination on what it means to be a sensate individual living in a difficult world coming to terms with oneself all wrapped up in a wonderful story built on well-wrought prose.

As the story opens we encounter our old friends Simon Darcourt, Maria Theotoky, and Arthur Cornish some years after we first met them in _The Rebel Angels_.  They are haggling over some problems that Darcourt is having with the inaugural work commissioned by the Cornish Foundation, meant to launch this benevolent body founded by Arthur and Maria into the world of artistic patronage. It is in fact a biography of Francis Cornish, the somewhat mysterious art collector and millionaire whose death played an important, though ancillary, role in the first volume of the Cornish trilogy. It appears as though Darcourt’s problems are two-fold: one is that there are simply too few facts for him to compose anything like the comprehensive scholarly work of biography he desires, the other is that those nuggets that he is able to intuit from the sparse facts of Cornish’s life lead him to believe that some unexpectedly provocative revelations may lie behind what on the surface had seemed a sedentary, even boring, life. Arthur wants none of it. His foundation is surely not to be launched into the world with a work whose main thesis may be that his own uncle was something of a charlatan, or at the very least a man of disingenuous aspect. Darcourt simply bemoans the fact the he is likely never to know the truth of the “rum things” that seem to lie in the background of the life and times of Francis Cornish.

Luckily for the reader Davies has Zadkiel, the minor angel of biography, and Maimas, the personal daimon of Francis Cornish himself, appear on the scene to enlighten us with the true tale of his life. We are at first treated to a view of Francis’ immediate forbears, setting the scene as Maimas would have it, for the places and people that would shape him for better or worse upon his arrival in the world. Thus we meet the premier inhabits of the tiny Canadian hamlet of Blairlogie (the “jumping off point” as some might uncharitably call it): the Senator (Francis’ grandfather James McRory), a man of humble beginnings who rises to prominence in the economic and political world of turn of the century Canada due to shrewd decisions and the ability and desire to take risks, and his comfort-loving wife, Francis’ grand-mère. There is also the sweetly draconian and pious Catholic Aunt Mary-Ben, a spinster who takes over the management of the Senator’s household ostensibly to allow his wife the freedom required to fully live the life required of a society woman, and of course Francis’ parents: the Senator’s favourite daughter Mary-Jim and her very odd husband Francis “the Wooden Soldier” Cornish…the tale of their meeting and circumstances surrounding their marriage plays an important role in the first part of the narrative and ultimately sets the scene for the boy, and man, Francis is to become. Added to these ‘main players’ are the numerous background figures and servants of the prominent household, many of whom will play a much larger role in the life and development of Francis than they, or any of their ‘betters’, might  have thought likely. With this the scene is set for Davies’ preoccupation with the twin pillars upon which our lives are built: nature and nurture.

Francis’ life in Blairlogie is lonely and often hard. Being the sensitive and often neglected son of the most prominent family in a small rough-and-tumble backwoods town is not exactly an enviable position for a little boy, especially when you get moved to a school on the other side of the tracks. Francis’ parents and grandparents are often absent, even when they are physically near him, and so his fostering is taken over primarily by his well-meaning, though strange and often misguided Aunt Mary-Ben, as well as the servants Victoria Cameron (a staunch and somewhat harsh, though caring, Presbyterian) and the kind, but unconventional groom Zadok Hoyle. All of these people strongly shape Francis’ young mind, usually in contrary ways, so that he is pulled in several different directions by the people who should be providing him with a stable life. As far as Maimas is concerned this is all to the good, for he cannot forge a great man with the small stuff of ‘normalcy’. Also, Francis is a resourceful boy (who has luckily been ‘gifted’ with his own inspirational daimon) and is thus able to take the varied and ambiguous gifts of these people and form them into something approximating a complete, though certainly fragmented, personality. From these strange roots Francis grows an intriguing crown: a profound love of and ability in art, a deep desire to find the eternal feminine that can provide him with the comfort and love that has always been so elusive to him, and a sense of charity and compassion tempered by a love of money and somewhat cynical eye. All in all it is a foundation that Francis himself describes as “A Catholic soul in Protestant chains”. There is one other shadow-figure of supreme importance to Francis’ life and development, but I will leave the discovery of his role and identity to you from the story itself.

From the small beginnings of rural Ontario Francis moves to the ‘big city’ of Toronto where he attends both Colborne College and ‘Spook’ (academic proving grounds familiar to those of us who have read more widely in Davies) before moving on to Oxford and the wider world of pre-WWII Europe. Here Francis will meet a variety of new people with whose lives and interests he will become entangled, both professionally and personally. Some will be lovers (both nurturing and destructive), others will be mentors and rivals (both very instructive roles). All of these relationships will be used by Maimas to forge Francis into the man he envisions: the ultimate work of art combining elements of both the physical and the spiritual world into an enigmatic, but complete human being. In the end Francis is led by both his interests and his connections not only into the world of art and scholarship, but also the realm of espionage and subterfuge. Ultimately he shapes himself into the skilled, knowledgeable, and supremely secretive man who is to provide such an enigmatic puzzle for the would-be biographer Darcourt.

As I said in my opening this book is great. I won’t go any farther into a précis of Francis' life, Davies details it with much more colour, wit, and interest than I could manage in a review, but I have to say that Francis Cornish is a compelling character (at least as much as that equally charming rascal Dunstan Ramsay) and the story of his life is one well worth reading. It is, I think, Davies’ tour-de-force that takes up all of his concerns and preoccupations, uniting them to the story of a life whose variety and pathos makes it both accessible and enlightening.

Definitely check it out.

Also posted at Goodreads

Young Love Done Wrong

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
2013
Reviewed by Diane K. M.
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars



I need to state right away that YA is not one of my favorite genres: I hated the Twilight books, I'm not a fan of paranormal romance and I've been avoiding the flood of YA dystopian novels. I want this to be clear because if you like YA, then my negative reaction probably won't apply to you. You may love this book, as many others already have.

I wanted to read this novel because it received several glowing reviews and it was being compared to John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars," which I really liked. "Eleanor & Park" is set in a high school in Omaha in 1986. The titular characters are teenagers who meet on the school bus -- Eleanor dresses weird and is new at the school; Park is biracial and tries to keep his head down so he won't get picked on. The two bond over comic books and music and fall into puppy love.

My main complaint is that Rowell tried putting 10 pounds of plot into a 5-pound bag. As if the outsiders-fall-in-love story wasn't enough, she gave Eleanor a hellish home life: her stepfather is abusive, neglectful and had previously kicked her out of the house for standing up to him. Meanwhile, Park, whose father is white and his mother is Korean, feels like a "pussy" compared to his ex-military dad, who yells at him a lot. Much of this family stuff didn't ring true and it felt so forced that I had to do a lot of skimming to survive the home scenes. Of course, I also had to skim a lot of the school scenes because the dialogue of the teens was so contrived.

And then there are all the retro pop culture references -- never for a page does Rowell let you forget that the story is set in 1986. OK, OK, we get it already.

But what really made me want to heave this book across the room was the ping-pong writing style. Rowell wrote very short sections, bouncing back and forth and back and forth between Eleanor and Park's point of view. It is the perfect example of how limited the modern attention span is that writers think the only way a young person will read something is if it's in short posts. (Curse you, Twitter!)

I think "Eleanor & Park" was trying to do too much and ended up being bad at all of it. There are so many other books that do all of these elements better. For young love, I really liked John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars." For 1980s references that aren't overdone, I liked Carol Rifka Brunt's "Tell the Wolves I'm Home." For dysfunctional family, try Jeannette Walls' "The Glass Castle."

As for me, this book may have scared me away from YA for a while. I'm sticking with adult books, because I'm an adult who is getting grouchy about losing precious reading time on mediocre stories.

More Precious Stories From Afghanistan

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
2013
Reviewed by Diane K. M.
My rating: 3 out of 5 stars




This is a difficult book to review. Hosseini is a good storyteller, but I have the same complaint about this book as I did with "The Kite Runner," which is that it is too precious. As in, roll-your-eyes, on-the-nose precious.

But before I focus on the negative, let me share the positive: This is an impressive story that spans generations and continents. Each chapter is told from a different character's point of view, and each section builds on the events that have come before, and by the end we have covered more than 60 years of a family's story.

The book opens with a legend about a giant who would go to a village and demand a child be sacrificed to him. A father was forced to give up his favorite son, and he was so heartbroken and upset that he later left the village to try and retrieve him from the giant. But when he arrived at the giant's house after many days of walking, he saw that his son was happy and was living a better life than he could have provided. The giant takes pity on the father and gives him a potion to help him forget his son. But did the father ever really forget?

The meaning of this legend is soon made evident when we meet a boy, Abdullah, who is forced to say goodbye to his beloved sister, Pari, who is being sent to Kabul to be adopted. In the next chapter we meet the woman who will become Abdullah's stepmother, then we meet Abdullah's uncle, then we meet some cousins who used to be neighbors of the uncle... and so on, and so on.

There are many good moments in the book, such as when a character recognizes his or her selfishness and vows to do better. Or when relatives have been reunited after a long separation because of the war. And as the story unfolds, we must ask if Pari was better off being adopted, or should she have stayed with her family in the village?

A minor complaint of mine is I think Hosseini skimped on details of the wars in Afghanistan and on the clashes with the Taliban. True, he covered this in previous books, and in this book one of the characters wrote in a letter that the wars have been well-documented elsewhere, so there's no point in describing it. But I disagree, because I think it was a bit of laziness on the author's part. This is a story about an Afghanistan family from the 1950s to present day. The war violently disrupted the country and the family, and yet here it only surfaces as background noise. (For readers who want to know more about Afghanistan during this time period, I recommend the memoir "The Favored Daughter" by Fawzia Koofi.)

For most of the book I was prepared to give it four stars, but about three-fourths of the way through I grew weary of the too precious dialogue, the characters who were just too earnest and understanding, and the seemingly endless exposition. What finally pushed me over the edge was an extended section in Greece, which I think could have been cut entirely.

I think Hosseini is a big bestselling author because he tells good stories -- and for most people, that is enough. But when I compare him to my other favorite novelists, his books leave me wanting something more.

The Blue Blazes

The Blue Blazes by Chuck Wendig
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mookie Pearl has been working for the Organization for most of his adult life. When his boss reveals he has terminal cancer, who should show up just in time to exploit that than Mookie's own daughter? And who is the mysterious Candlefly that has shown up to help The Boss in his hour of need? And what do the creatures of the Underworld have to say about the situation?

It's hard to summarize a novel that packs so many great ideas between two covers. The easiest way I can think of to pitch The Blue Blazes to people is to say "Neverwhere Noir."

The Blue Blazes is the latest of Chuck Wendig's innovative urban fantasies. The main character, Mookie Pearl, is a thick-headed mountain of a man working for the Organization, the criminal syndicate that controls NYC at street level. Below the streets is another story entirely, for that is the Underworld, the territory of Gobbos, Roach-Rats, Snakefaces, and things a thousand times worse.

The Blue Blazes of the title is the street name for a drug that lets the user see beneath the veil, revealing half and halfs and other mystical creatures for what they are. It goes a long way toward explaining the usual urban fantasy conceit of monsters living among us more or less undetected.

This isn't your grandmother's urban fantasy. Instead of lightly flirting with the hardboiled noir genre, The Blue Blazes has it's way with it hard and rough in the filthy alley behind the porno theater. Mookie's no white knight. He's a thug and a murderer and does what he has to do. He actually reminds me of Richard Stark's Parker, only with more muscles and much less brain. The conflict between Mookie and Nora is what keeps the book rocketing forward, even when everyone's having a chat.

The situation looks like one of the standard criminal fiction plots at first: the boss is going down and a lot of people are wondering who is going to fill the void. Will it be Nora, Mookie's estranged daughter? Will it be the Boss's grandson? Will it be Candlefly?

The mythology of the world Wendig has created is unique: there are no vampires, werewolves, or women wanting to have sex with vampires or werewolves. There are cities of the dead in the Underworld but they aren't populated by zombies. I love the concept of the pigments and the powers they confer. I could go on for paragraphs about the Hungry Ones, the Naga, the gangs, soul cages, etc.

Mookie muscles his way through the plot like a meat-cleaver-wielding battering ram. Much like the fabled Timex, he takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'. By the time the Blue Blazes was over, I was simultaneously dismayed that the journey was completed but also somehow relieved.

4.5 stars. I want more Mookie!

View all my reviews

Pressing On More Sail

Post Captain by Patrick O'Brian
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Dancing bears and loons that fancy themselves teapots? No, number two in the series is not a typical Aubrey/Maturin adventure, yet it is perhaps better than the first!

While book one, Master & Commander, was about war and friendship, the second book, Post Captain enters the love arena, and friendship is put to the test. Of course war is not forgotten, this is a historical fiction series set during the Napoleonic Wars after all. The career of our hero Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy intertwines with his unlikely friend's, an Irish/Catalan surgeon, natural philosopher and (view spoiler)[spy (hide spoiler)] named Stephen Maturin. In this volume, containing one of the most ludicrous episodes in their adventures, the two must navigate the dangerous waters of the Peace of Amiens, which ceases hostilities for all of Europe...just not for Aubrey and Maturin.

If you survived book one's interminable explanations of naval terminology and are willing to give Patrick O'Brian a second chance, you'll be rewarded by the second book's smoother, more balanced plotting. The man's writing is worth your effort (and patience if you're not into the subject matter). He's been called the Jane Austen of his genre and that complimentary comparison is no more apparent than in Post Captain. With the Peace, Aubrey and Maturin find themselves back on land and prey to debt collectors and a predatory woman trying to find suitable victims husbands for her very Bennet-esque family of all marriage-aged young women. A love triangle ensues that would be at home in any of Austen's Something and Something novels.

Woman do not play a huge role in the series, but a much larger one than might be assumed in books about naval warfare. Often they are in the background, off-stage if you will, influencing the actions of the principle characters, but when women do take the stage, they know their lines. O'Brian fleshes them out well, imbuing them with spines and brains, or a lack thereof when appropriate. They come alive and stand as well-rounded as the men.

If you've migrated to this series for its entertaining action, sea battles, technically correct descriptions of sailing, worry not! Some of the subject matter (even Aubrey's ship itself!) is a touch unorthodox, but there's still enough of what you came for and I doubt you'll be disappointed in continuing on with this very satisfying series.

Setting Sail!

Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Master and Commander begins English author Patrick O'Brian's lush and literary epic seafaring historical fiction series based on the career of a naval captain during the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

Through out the entire series O'Brian delves into the themes of love, war and friendship. At the heart of M&C is the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey and Irish surgeon and naturalistic Stephen Maturin. When they meet at the book's outset - Aubrey a lieutenant without a ship, Maturin a doctor without a penny - they nearly kill one another, but fortune forgives all and these two entirely opposite individuals are brought together into an unlikely but mutually beneficial friendship, one that at times tests boundaries, but also one that warms the reader's heart.

To fully enjoy these books you must cast your mind into that period, the very dawn on the 19th century, the Age of Sail, the Age of Enlightenment and Reason. As much of the story plays out upon ships serving the Royal Navy, English customs and manners are the rules of the game. Serving under the Englishman Aubrey and being Irish, Maturin and a fellow countryman bridle at this, but follow suit and guardedly hide their pasts to preserve their own skins.

At the beginning of the series Aubrey is the focal point. O'Brian fashioned him after real-life naval hero Admiral Thomas Cochrane. Brash, daring but not reckless, Cochrane made the perfect image from which to mould fictional heroes. Among other writers, C.S. Forester used Cochrane to create his much beloved Horatio Hornblower character. Though an admiral by the end of his career, Cochrane was not as widely known to the world outside of England after his own time (there's only so much room for the Nelsons and Wellingtons of the world), so his career could be mined for material, even mirrored in many cases, without the general reading public catching on a century or two later.

At first I hesitated to read O'Brian's work. I'd just read Forester's Hornblower series and I felt like O'Brian was merely treading upon his coattails. But Forester's work had left me wanting more and I'd also recently seen Peter Weir's movie "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World," which I enjoyed, so while perusing books at a shop one day and coming across M&C I flipped it open and read a couple paragraphs. I was hooked. The writing flowed with an ease, brilliance and heart that Forester's more stoic prose lacked. O'Brian is called the Jane Austen of his time and genre. Perhaps that is off-putting for some, but for me it equates literary excellence. It means exercising the English language and thrusting your pen into purpose-driven plotting.

Some will find the in-depth descriptions of ships and ship life laborious. I can't totally disagree. In fact M&C's publishers were hesitant to green light the book for that very reason. Here's a suggestion: muscle through those bits. Don't worry if you don't know the difference between bow and stern, port and starboard, or the maintop and the bilge. Stephen Maturin is used as the landsman foil through which much naval jargon may be learned and if you remain as ignorant as he does, you'll be fine. But on the other hand, if you like sailing, the navy, and attention to detail...my friend, you've struck gold!

Synopsis:
Reading about old naval battles may not be everyone's cup of tea. Thankfully O'Brian goes well beyond other writers of the genre, such as C.S. Forester's more limited scope by delving deep into the minds of his main characters. The full range of human behavior and the resulting affects it has on their actions is entwined so beautifully with O'Brian's full descriptive prose, touching on all the senses. Those with short attention spans demanding constant action maybe too impatient to read through these elegantly and intricately designed scenes with their highly tuned subtlety and nuance. But most will probably find that the author has struck a marvelous balance between literary high-mindedness and high-seas adventure.


Rating: I am tempted to give this five stars, and if it weren't for the too-lengthy and minute descriptions of naval matters, I probably would.

The Movie: Movies based on books are what they are: condensed versions that are not always representative of the original. Sourced from two books (and maybe more), while entirely leaving out a storyline integral to the book series, Weir's directorial effort represents M&C fairly well in its bursts of action between languid pauses to breathe in real life and the horrors/wonders of the world.

Another Great Novel from the Author of "Winter's Bone"

Reviewed by James L. Thane
Four out of five stars

This is another excellent book from Daniel Woodrell, who returns with his first novel since Winter's Bone in 2006.

In 1928, the tiny town of West Table, Missouri, was shattered by the explosion of the Arbor Dance Hall. Forty-two of the town's residents were killed in the explosion and in the fire that followed; dozens of others were injured. But although many explanations for the tragedy were put forward, the guilty party or parties were never identified and prosecuted.

Some townspeople blamed local gypsies; others thought that St. Louis mobsters were responsible. Some wondered if the explosion was the work of the local minister who preached hell and damnation and who railed against the "sinners" who patronized the dance hall.

Alma Dunahew is the mother of three boys and works as a domestic in the house of the town's leading banker. Alma's sister, Ruby, is a carefree young woman who uses and disposes of men as the spirit moves her, until the night she too becomes a victim of the dance hall tragedy.

Alma has her own idea about what happened that night, and as the incident overwhelms her emotionally, she gradually loses touch with reality. She alienates members of her own family and many of the townspeople; she loses her job and has to cobble together a living as best she can.

Years later, in 1965, her grandson Alek is sent to spend the summer with her and over the course of the summer, Alma slowly tells him the story of the events that led to the explosion of the dance hall. It's a riveting tale, told mostly in flashbacks and it grabs the reader from the opening line.

"She frightened me at every dawn the summer I stayed with her," young Alek later recalls. The reader can only be enormously impressed by the skill with which Daniel Woodrell tells Alma's story.