The Art of Fielding

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding was the book that I kept threatening to read all year long.  (Recent Example)  I don’t know why it took so long to get around to, but it definitely lives up to the hype.

The novel takes place largely over a single school year at Westish College, a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin.  The main character is Henry a once-in-a-lifetime shortstop of almost limitless potential.  Henry was “discovered” by Schwartz, the captain of Westish’s baseball team.  Schwartz drives Henry to achieve the dream that they both share, to play major league baseball, but only Henry has the talent to realize.  Woven into Henry’s story are the lives of Owen, Henry’s roommate and openly gay teammate, Guert Affenlight, the school’s president, and his daughter Pella.  Their stories intertwine, sometimes in completely unexpected ways.   You know what — that’s all I’m going to tell you about the plot.  You’re better off diving in and letting the story surprise you.

The Art of Fielding is also the title of  a book within the book.  Written by a famed (fictional) St Louis Cardinal’s shortstop, it is Henry’s bible.  The Art of Fielding is a collection of Zen-like koans that serve as meditations and Henry’s guide to playing his position.  An example:

3.  There are three stages: Thoughtless being.  Thought. Return to thoughtless being.
33.  Do not confuse the first and third stages.  Thougtless being is attained by everyone, the return to thoughtless being by a very few.

The idea that those two items would appear non-consecutively is part of the beauty.  The Art of Fielding (the fake one) needs to be written, too.

The novel also weaves literary references throughout – most notably Melville’s Moby-Dick.  The college features a statue of Melville in the main quad, because the author once gave a lecture at the college.  As a result, the school’s athletic teams are called the harpooners.  One of Henry’s teammates is named Starblind, surely a reference to the Pequod’s mate Starbuck.  The college bar is named Stubb’s, another of Ahab’s mates.  President Affenlight frequently references Melville, American poets, and literature.  Affenlight’s favorite chapter of Moby-Dick  features prominently in the book’s conclusion.  Henry, the least well read,  imagines himself as a sort of Ulysses in a moment of despair.

The effect of the references is to frame the novel as a Hormeric tale, an American epic, a modern-day Moby-Dick, where the chief (but not only) obsession is baseball.  The five main characters struggle to learn how to be their own true selves. No mean feat.  This is a fantastic novel.  As a result of reading The Art of Fielding, I’ve picked up my half-read copy of Moby-Dick and have begun to press on.  Next up, Nathaniel Philbrick’s Why Read Moby Dick to help fill in my own cognitive gaps.  Any book that is not only a cracking read in its own right but sets the reader off on a journey of additional reading is about as good as it gets.  The Art of Fielding will be on my year-end top 10 list (coming soon!) for certain.

Bonus:

Check out this interview with Harbach @ Baseball Nation ”The greatest baseball books aren’t really about baseball per se, they are simply great books that are set it in the baseball world.”  Indeed.

For an example of Harbach’s writing style, check out this brilliant essay for Grantland.

The Visible Man

I really like Chuck Klosterman.  I like his essays (e.g., Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs), and I like his fiction (e.g., Downtown Owl).  Plus I get him mixed up in my mind with Chuck Close, a super cool artist.  So he’s got it going on in my book.  When I saw that he had published a new novel, The Visible Man, I pushed it straight to the front of the queue.

Those of you who follow my reviews probably know by now that I don’t like to work too hard when I read; I like great characters, great stories, and great prose, but I don’t like to make my brain burn extra calories trying to figure stuff out — give it to me straight, doc.  Which makes The Visible Man a dark horse for me, because Klosterman takes an unorthodox approach to telling this tale.  But it worked, even for me.

This story centers on two characters:  Victoria Vick, an Austin-based therapist (although not a doctor), and a patient, referred to as “Y___”, who seeks her out for treatment.  The reason I don’t know the patient’s name is that the story is told through correspondence and notes from Vicky, which she has ostensibly submitted to her publisher, and in which she protects the patient’s identity by giving him this “name”.  Y___ reaches out to Vicky for “treatment”, although it is clear from the get-go that he has every intention of setting the rules of engagement for their relationship, beginning with the demand that they meet via telephone.  And it is also clear from their earliest sessions that Y___ has a huge ego, to the point where it’s not clear why he’s seeking counseling in the first place.

Y___’s issue seems to be that he needs a confidential sounding board to tell his stories to — stories that he’s arrogant and proud of — and which in the hands of someone other than Klosterman might have turned this into some weird science-fiction novel.  See, Y___ comes from a background in military and scientific research, and a specific project on “cloaking” technology that he finished by himself after the project was shut down.  He’s come up with a technology for making himself appear invisible (by bending light around his body and other things that you and I wouldn’t understand, and which he makes clear to Vicky that she wouldn’t understand either).  And he’s been using this technology to spy on people, particularly when they are alone, to try to divine the essence of human personalities — who are we when no one is looking?

The existence of this technology and the way Y___ uses it become the focus of the counseling sessions, and eventually weave their way into the actual personal dynamic between Vicky and Y___.    I won’t spoil the story, but I’ll vouch for Klosterman’s uncanny ability to approach what makes people tick in interesting and unusual ways, and I’ll also vouch for the fact that you won’t put this book down once you pick it up.

The Leftovers

A confession: I was pretty sure that I did not want to read The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta.  At all.  The subject matter as I understood it, a story of what happens after the Rapture-like event comes to pass, didn’t seem like my thing.  As luck would have it, Tom Perrotta was a featured author at the Decatur Book Festival.  I went to see him read from the novel, and the next thing I knew I was getting my own copy of the book signed by the author.  Signed copy in hand, it seemed that actually reading the novel would be the next logical thing to do.

I suppose what I thought the book was going to be was a wink-wink style satire of the Rapture and the people who believe that such a thing is imminent – something mean-spirited.  Perrorra signals the reader that this is not where the novel is going right upfront – on Page 2 of the prologue actually – when a character reflects on what she thought of the Rapture – before:

It felt like religious kitsch, as tacky as a black velvet painting, the kind of fantasy that appealed to people who ate too much fried food, spanked their kids, and had no problem with the theory that their loving God invented AIDS to punish the gays.  Every once in a while…she’d spot someone reading one of the Left Behind books in an airport or on a train, and feel a twinge of pity, and even a little bit of tenderness, for the poor sucker who had nothing better to read, and nothing else to do, except sit around dreaming about the end of the world.  And then it happened.  The biblical prophecy came true…

There is some disagreement over whether the baffling disappearance of millions of people from the face of the earth (and millions left behind) is truly a Rapture-like religious reckoning or something else entirely.  It quickly comes to be referred to as the  ”Sudden Departure” on the 24-hour news channels.

The novel focuses on how the aftermath plays out in a middle-sized town.  The titular “leftovers” are stunned both by overwhelming grief for the loved ones who suddenly disappeared from their lives and the existential angst of what it means that they weren’t among those taken. It’s a fascinating premise.  Naturally, many people choose to abruptly live their lives in a different way.  Some see no point in living as they had been, and they frequently resort to extreme or bizarre worldviews to hammer out some sense of the inexplicable.  Others try to continue on with a normal life despite the fundamental shift in the world around them.

Perrotta, to his credit, treats all of this very seriously.  The novel is never cartoonish, and it’s interesting to see where he leads.  This is a thought-provoking novel and a good read.  I’m glad that I stumbled across Perrotta at the Decatur Book Fest, or I would have clung to my very wrong preconceptions on what this novel is all about.  I recommend checking it out

Post Script:  As I was finishing The Leftovers, a copy of the audiobook version arrived in the BGB mailbox.  I handed it off to Anne, the BGB reviewer who uses audiobooks to keep from harming fellow Atlantans in traffic.  I’m looking forward to hearing what she thinks about it.  It’s that kind of book.

The Cut

George Pelecanos.  I’ve been meaning to read some of his work for years after watching so much of it on television. Treme. The Wire.  He’s one of the kings of television as novel.  So it would follow that he would be pretty good as the author of a novel as a novel.  Right? I didn’t know where to start.   The author appeared this year at the Decatur Book Festival to talk about his new novel The Cut and crime writing in general.  It was excellent.  The Cut is the first in a planned series and Treme is between seasons, so it seemed like the perfect time to get on board.

The Cut “stars” Spero Lucas, a returned combat Marine back from serving in Iraq.   He’s a detail guy and has found a niche working for a defense attorney as an investigator.  He can handle himself and is detail oriented.  His work on a particular case leads to Spero’s involvement with a criminal who hires him to recover some stolen property.  He works on the case for a cut of the action.  Spero slowly but surely wades into the darker side of the shades of gray concerning legality around the job.

Throughout the novel, the issues of race and class in its relation to crime in DC are at the forefront.  Spero is from a mixed-race family adopted by Greek parents. This background and his habit of dressing in  blue collar work clothes while on the job help Spero to blend in with his surroundings in almost any situation.  Add in a love for food from the corner diner to DC’s best restaurants and the reader is given a virtual all-access pass to the nation’s capitol.

Pelecanos has said that he wants readers to find in his books an “accurate, almost journalistic accounts of the life of the city [DC].”  I have a friend who is a hotshot newspaper editor.  His theory is that any book over 300 pages is in need of an editor.   Pelecanos is clearly working from the same journalist’s viewpoint.  The Cut is 292 pages, and there is little extraneous detail. Whenever someone walks into a room or place, there is a quick description of the location and personal appearances and then back to the action.   The dialogue sometimes comes across as stilted as a result, but it too quickly moves on.  No harm/no foul.

I’m not sure how representative The Cut is of Pelecanos’s body of written work, but it was certainly a well-crafted, tight little novel.  It’s maybe not as good as the best episodes of Treme or The Wire, but it holds its own.  I’ll be checking out more Pelecanos in the future.

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?

My sleeper hit for 2011 is the amazing Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion by Johan Harstad.   I stumbled across this novel while browsing in Denver’s Tattered Cover Book Store.  It was highlighted as a staff pick.   I had never heard of the novel before, and it’s put out by a press that I had never heard of before either (Seven Stories Press).  It is translated from Norwegian by Deborah Dawkins.  It has a wonderfully odd title, and it opens with the memorable line “The person you love is 72.8% water, and it hasn’t rained for weeks.”  A book on my shopping list was immediately bumped and Buzz Aldrin leaped to the top of my reading stack.

Buzz Aldrin figures into this novel due to his stature as the second man to walk on the moon.  Our anti-hero Mattias was born in Norway during the moon landing, with dad in the delivery room straining to hear the details on the radio out in hall.  He grows up obsessed with space travel and Aldrin in particular.  What’s unique about Mattias is that he doesn’t want to stand out in any way.  He wants to be invisible to the world but useful.  He describes it as wanting to be a cog in a machine – a cog in an important, contributing machine – that is never noticed.  Buzz Aldrin, the man completely overshadowed by Neil Armstrong,  is his perfect role model in this regard.  Buzz Aldrin’s later problems in life also serve as a nice mirror for what lies ahead for Mattias’s own life.

Mattias’s approach to life seems to work pretty well until he loses his girlfriend of several years due in part to his need to be invisible. Mattias comes unmoored when he loses his job at a gardening center shortly thereafter.  A trip to the Faroe Islands to lend support for a friend’s band goes seemingly very wrong when he finds himself face down in the middle of the street with no idea what has happened since the ferry ride over.

The silver lining to this misadventure is that Mattias is found by a psychiatrist who runs “a post-psychiatric” facility in the bucolic town of Gjógv.  In an isolated corner of one of the world’s most isolated countries Mattias may have found the ideal spot to disappear from the world while being a small cog in small machine.  When Mattias learns that the Apollo 11 astronauts once visited the islands in preparation for their moon landing, it seems that he may well have found his true home.  Life is rarely that simple, however.

One of the many things that I loved about this novel is that I was completely unfamiliar with the people and places where the novel takes place.  I frequently pulled up Google Earth to check out the Faroe Islands locations being discussed. If I ever found myself in need of a post-psychiatric facility to regroup, I think I would like it to be in Gjógv.  I’m sure that I’d like to find myself there some day regardless. Check out these pictures so see what I mean.  Gorgeous.

One of the characters has “an episode” after viewing a painting at the National Gallery in Tórshavn. The painting, by artist Sámal Joensen-Mikines, is called ”Hjem fra begravelse” (Home from the funeral).  This is it:

It apparently takes most of a wall in the gallery.  Well no wonder she had an episode.

Another fun thing about the novel were frequent mentions of the Swedish band The Cardigans.  I’ve been a fan of the band for years, and it was cool to realize that the perfectly apt section titles were taken from the band’s albums.  That the same four titles also feature prominently in the story is a nifty trick.

This is an amazing first novel that rarely takes you where you think it is going to go.  It’s an inventive narrative that repeatedly surprises the reader.  I will read anything by Johan Harstad that is translated into English.  I loved it. Check it out.  And I should mention again: I never would have found this book were it not for the efforts of the Tattered Cover staff to get it noticed.  So hooray for independent booksellers!

Audio Bonus:    Since The Cardigans are featured prominently in the novel, it seems fitting to add some of their music here as a mini-soundtrack to the novel:

The Cardigans – My Favourite Game

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The Cardigans – Erase and Rewind

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The Marriage Plot

Jeffrey Eugenides!  Author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex.  Pulitzer Prize Winner.   Dude on a Times Square billboard.  When I received an advance reader copy of his latest novel this summer -  The Marriage Plot - expectations were high.  Those expectations were crushed in short order when I read the first five pages three times, could get no further, and put the book back on the shelf until fall with a sigh.  Eventually, I picked it back up with tempered expectations.

The novel kicks off at Brown University in the early eighties and tells the story of three students that become involved in a love triangle of sorts.  The early reviews that I read were all agog that Eugenides begins the novel with a shout out to literature.  The very first line of the novel is, “To start with, look at all the books.”   I’m guessing that the reviewers had similar book shelves.  I did not, and I often found the establishment of the literary bona fides tedious.  Madeleine, an English major writing her thesis on the Regency/Victorian-era “marriage plot,” isn’t too enthusiastic about literature herself:

Some people majored in English to prepare for law school.  Others became journalists.   The smartest guy in the honors program, Adam Vogel, a child of academics, was planning on getting a Ph.D. and becoming an academic himself.  That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default,  Because they weren’t left-brained enough for science, because history was too dry, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical–because they weren’t musical artistic, financially motivated, or really that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they’d done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn’t know what to major in majored in.

Ouch. The tediousness reaches its height when Eugenides discusses the ins-and-outs of a semiotics class that our star-crossed trio take together. Eventually though, a story takes place.

Madeleine becomes involved with Leonard Bankhead, the “bad boy” in the love triangle.  Leonard is a handsome former burnout from Portland.  He wears flannel and chews tobacco and turns out to be manic-depressive.  Not very Ivy League.  The other corner of the triangle is Mitchell – the “good boy.”  How good is Mitchell?  He is a relatively chaste religious studies major who at one point in the novel finds himself in India working for Mother Theresa.  Not kidding.  So you know who Madeleine chooses, right?

Early in the novel, Eugenides tips his hand on where the novel is headed in a discussion of the outline for Madeleine’s thesis:

…Madeleine was going to move on to the Victorian novel, where things got more complicated and considerably darker.  Middlemarch and The Portrait of a Lady didn’t end with weddings.  They began with the traditional moves of the marriage plot–the suitors, the proposals, the misunderstandings–but after the wedding ceremony they keep going.  These novels followed their spirited, intelligent heroines…into their disappointing married lives, and it was here that the marriage plot reached its greatest artistic expression.

There is a marriage, and it should be no surprise that it becomes disappointing.  Things get complicated and considerably dark.   However intelligent Madeleine may be, however, she doesn’t come across as all that spirited.  Fatalistic would be my description. Madeleine seems to be carried along by events as though she has no control over the story of her own life.

As much as I’ve griped about the novel in this review, I did come away with a grudging appreciation by its end.  I cared enough about the characters, eventually, to want to know how things turned out.  The Marriage Plot is not Eugenides’s “greatest artistic expression,”   but this is in no way a terrible novel.   My own very high expectations for this novel set a bar that I think few novels would have been capable of achieving.

Matterhorn

After reading about how Tim learned about the novel Matterhorn by Karl Melantes and then reading his review, I decided that this war book had to go on my list.  I didn’t read it however, I listened to it.  I’ve seen plenty of movies about the Vietnam War but I’ll admit, I never thought I’d be interested in reading about it.  Reading or listening, Matterhorn is one intense novel.

The story begins with a very graphic incident of a leach being found where no leach belongs. (I had to actually look up leaches because I didn’t realize how horrible they can be.) We quickly learn about crotch rot, heating coffee in cans with explosives and living in a jungle with no food or water.

Yale educated, Second Leutenant Mellas, has volunteered with the Marines during the Vietnam War.  He wants to believe that his reasons for volunteering are to build his resume.

Mr. Melantes immediately transports us into the jungle, to a mountain called Matterhorn, where we follow Mellas through his first three months in Vietnam.  Mellas and his company, due to egos above them, are forced to survive for seven days on just a few days of rations.  They are ordered to build barracks and then ordered to leave and build somewhere else.  They are forced into ambushes for which they aren’t equiped.  And although discouraged by losing limbs and lives, they march onward to finish the job that they have been ordered do complete.

There are quite a few battles raging throughout the story in addition to the war.  Within the company, the racial unrest reflects the inequality at home. The captains and colonels making the strategic decisions are fighting their own political war as well, which makes me just as ill as the actual fighting.  And throughout the story, Mellas has his own internal conflicts –  did he try to save the wounded soldier because he wanted the medal? or because he cared?  Can it be for both reasons?  He spends a lot of time contemplating the war, his friendships and his past.

Mr. Melantes has written a war novel for men and women.  Men love war scenes, right?  I enjoyed these glimpses into war myself,  but I may not have enjoyed the story as much without the complete development of the characters and their relationships with each other.  I really cared for these ‘kids’ and was brought to tears several times.

When Matterhorn ends I wonder what happens to everyone.   The story only covers the first three months, then what? What does Mellas become? What about the young men who begin their adulthood fighting in a war?  I want to believe everyone gets out, but reality in war dictates that very few will come out alive or whole.   If Mr. Melantes decides to write about the rest of Mellas’ tour, then my questions will be answered.

Tim:   Hi, Anne.  Hate to muscle in on your review here, but I just wanted to note that Karl Marlantes is reading tonight at The Tattered Cover in Denver.  Which is where I am this week.  Woohoo.   Carry on.

City of Thieves

City of Thieves, by David Benioff, is the first book I acquired based solely on a “recommendation” from Goodreads.  And if this is any indication, I suspect there will be many more to come.

This is the most complete page-turner I’ve read in a long time.  It is entertaining, suspenseful, moving, sad, and funny, all at the same time.  The book opens with the author trying to learn more from his beloved grandparents about their history, knowing that they are Jewish immigrants who survived World War II in Europe.  When his grandfather gets our author alone, he begins to tell the story of his adventures during the Siege of Leningrad during WWII, and the remainder of the book is the tale he tells.  (I couldn’t help picturing the opening scene of The Princess Bride.)

The author’s grandfather, Lev, was a seventeen year-old living in Leningrad in a sprawling apartment complex during the Siege of Leningrad.  Lev’s father, a poet who had written some inflammatory material, had been taken away (never to be heard from again), and his mother and sister had fled the city; Lev stayed behind, feeling obliged to remain in the city he loved.  This was a time of fierce martial law, scarcity of food (residents had ration cards), and strict curfew.  Lev and his friends would see the light show resulting from bombings and anti-aircraft fire nightly, and one night they witnessed a paratrooper drifting from the sky toward their complex.  They were intrigued, and despite curfew, went to investigate.  The paratrooper was German and had apparently frozen to death in the sky; Lev and his friends searched the body and took what they could find from him, but as they were taking slugs of liquor from the dead man’s flask, Russian soldiers appeared.  As the youths tried to run back to their apartments, Lev was captured while saving his friend who had slipped and fallen.

The penalty for such a curfew violation was death, and Lev was certain that would be his fate.  He was taken to prison and put in a cell with Kolya, a talkative, handsome Russian soldier who had been accused of desertion.  The two are temporarily spared from execution by Colonel Grechko, whose beautiful daughter is to be married the following Saturday.  The colonel needs eggs to bake the wedding cake, and so he sends Lev and Kolya on a mission to find eggs.  If they can return with eggs in time, they will be released; if they do not, they will be found and killed.

The story follows the two as they scour Leningrad and surrounding areas on their quest; it is January, they’re on foot, and they have little in the way of supplies.  They are justifiably paranoid and fearful as they meet strange characters and live in constant peril, and they form a strong bond that makes you root for both of them like you’ve never rooted for anyone before.  In many ways this is a sort of buddy story/road trip novel, despite the lack of choice the two were given as to whether to be buddies or to take a road trip.

Like The Kite Runner, this was a story set in a foreign land and steeped in history that I sadly had little knowledge of or familiarity with; but like The Kite Runner, that only drew me in more.  I absolutely loved this book, and I give it two big thumbs up; if I had three thumbs, I’d give it three.

My Father’s House

If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you know that author Ben Tanzer is a friend and an all around great guy.  You’ll know that my reviews usually begin with a disclaimer that I am totally biased, and I may even mention that the work in question is his best book yet. Ben has a new novella called My Father’s House.  I ask your indulgence when once again I  (truthfully) make the claim that it is his best work yet. You’ll just need to read it yourself to back my call.

Ben’s books typically focus on guys, guys the age of the author and I, trying to make sense of being an adult.  My Father’s House begins with a man remembering how his father’s illness, a rare form of bone cancer, entered the family’s life and changed it forever.  It’s heavy stuff, but it is so well done, that the book never feels like a chore or pity party.

One of the things that I love about Ben’s writing is his reference to popular culture to create a context for a given scene.  What I love about Ben’s references is that, by and large, they are my cultural touchstones as well.  In one example, the narrator explains to his therapist why he wasn’t embarrassed by his dad’s unorthodox lifestyle by drawing on John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire.

“…when I was a kid I read The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving and there is a section of the book where the remaining family is living in Vienna and  the narrator goes out for drinks with his father to this fancy bar.  The son is concerned about being seen with his father who is quite eccentric in dress and personality. When they get inside the bar though it turns out his father is a regular there and the patrons all love him for who he is regardless, or maybe because of, how he dresses and what that represents them.”  ”So it isn’t a problem then?”  ”No that was the least of the problems.”

I haven’t read The Hotel New Hampshire since I was teen myself, but I instantly got it.  Now I have another book to revisit.

This book is a work of fiction.  However, I do know that Ben’s father was an artist, just like the narrator’s, who died of a similar, if not the same, form of cancer.  (And if I’m not mistaken, the cover art is one of Ben’s father’s paintings.)  It is clear that Ben drew from his own experience, because the emotions shared on the page have the unmistakable ring of truth.  Within the novella, our narrator gives an indication of what Ben’s experience writing the book may have been like:

I realize yet again that even though I may be able to cry these days, it doesn’t mean I don’t still struggle to feel things, and this is important because here I am trying to figure out what it takes to be a writer, and like my dad, my first inclination is not to dig and uncover all those horrible things that might be lurking beneath the surface, the regrets and the pain, the confusion and the sense that I never feel like I understand what everyone else seems to get about how these things work.  The thing is I need to dig in if the writing is going to be honest and resonate with people.  The question as always is whether I am willing to do so.

My Father’s House is honest and resonated with this reader.  In the end, the author must have dug in.  We both win.

The Art of Fielding

I had seen a couple of unrelated but equally glowing blurbs about Chard Harbach’s debut novel, The Art of Fielding.  Since my Cleveland Indians had dropped out of the pennant race, I figured this might be a great way for me to get back into the baseball spirit.  This is a fantastic book — it’s well-written, it’s a great story, and it features an amazing cast of engaging characters (feel free to add more superlatives to that sentence if you like — they’re deserved).

The book opens with a focus on Henry Skrimshander, a scrawny but gifted young shortstop from somewhere in the Dakotahs.  Mike Schwartz, the brawny catcher and team captain for the Westish Harpooners, a Division III school from Wisconsin, happens to catch Henry’s post-game fielding practice ritual after a summer league game and sees enormous potential for Henry.  Schwartz somehow finagles a way for Henry to matriculate to Westish and join the baseball team.

While Henry and his deep-seated admiration for Aparicio Rodriquez, (a fictional shortstop for the St. Louis Cardinals who wrote a book entitled “The Art of Fielding”), are the initial centerpiece of the story, other characters weave in and out of center stage and draw the reader in.  There’s the aforementioned Mike Schwartz, an inspiring and motivational bear of a man who mentors Henry, Owen Dunne, Henry’s “gay mulatto roommate”, Guert Affenlight, the president of Westish who struggles with his sexuality, Pella Affenlight, Guert’s daughter who comes to visit after her marriage fails, and other members of the baseball team and campus fabric.  While Harbach shifts his focus from character to character, he never loses the reader and compels you to keep turning pages to see what might happen next for whomever is in your sights at that moment.

Each of our characters wrestles with one demon or another; most of these are part of that character’s fundamental make-up, with the exception of Henry, whose nebulous nemesis comes out of nowhere when the normally flawless fielder one day during a game mysteriously makes a wide throw to first base that sails past the firstbaseman into the dugout and hits Owen square in the face.  Henry is devastated, and begins for the first time to think while he fields and throws, undermining his natural skills.  Henry’s rise and fall and his struggles along the way form the backdrop for the others’ personal internal struggles.

The Art of Fielding features numerous common literary elements and themes — romance, conflict, redemption, etc. — but manages to incorporate them into a wonderfully compelling story without feeling unoriginal.  No vampires, no wizards, just a good read.

Overdue Book Review: Two by China Miéville

These overdue book reviews are getting out of hand.  I had no idea that I was so far behind.  Time to start doubling-up.

After reading the amazing The City and The City by China Miéville (my review), I decided that I needed to start digging into the author’s other novels.  Over the summer I tackled the Miéville’s latest, Embassytown, and another recent novel, Kraken.

Embassytown

Embassytown begins with alternating chapters from “before” and “after”.   Before and after what, exactly, are a mystery.  The reader is left purposely adrift for almost 100 pages, trying to figure out what’s going on.  It’s almost as though the author were purposely trying to eliminate the easily distracted readers before getting to the meat of the story.  Once the stories merge, it becomes a fascinating sci-fi novel of big ideas.

The embassy town of the title is located on a remote planet on the edge of the explored universe.  The planet is inhabited by strange creatures who are useful in that they are able to “biomanufacture” products.   The products are grown on farms and then shipped via living intestinal-type pipes into the human city, the embassy town, where they are prepared for shipment to waiting consumers.  If that’s not the perfect metaphor for the manufacture/consumer relationship, I don’t know what is.  However interesting this process is, it’s not the central idea behind Embassytown.

The creatures living on this planet have two mouths that they use for speech.  Their speech is represented in the novel by the part spoken by one mouth written as though it were the numerator and the part spoken by the second mouth as the denominator.  If it seems that speaking from two mouths would be a recipe for duplicity, that’s not the case here – at first.  The beings on this planet cannot conceive of that which is not – or lies.  The introduction of lies, which has a narcotic effect on the locals, leads to a planet of language junkies and a colonist population in danger of total destruction.

Any attempt to summarize the novel, like this one, almost necessarily does a disservice to the novel.  Embassytown is a sprawling epic on the ideas of languages, how they work, their meaning, and their importance to life itself.  I enjoyed the novel and was ready for more Miéville, but I recognize that Embassytown is clearly not everyone’s thing.

Kraken

Kraken is an entirely different novel.  This novel is set in a what is more or less modern-day London.  It begins with Billy Harrow noting the abrupt departure  of a man with a doomsday sandwich board from his regular spot outside the London Natural History Museum. Foreshadowing.  Billy is a curator of exhibits at the museum.  His prize specimen – the museum’s prize specimen – a perfectly intact giant squid, beautifully preserved by Billy, has disappeared.   The improbability of the enormous tank holding the squid just disappearing is baffling to all – but suggests an inside job.

The disappearance launches Billy into a world that is usually carefully hidden just beneath the surface of our world.  It is a world of strange sects, paranormal investigation police units, dark forces, spirits, magic, and mayhem.  The disappearance of the squid could possibly hint at the destruction of the world.  A lot is riding on locating the squid, and everyone believes that Billy, preserver of the specimen, holds the answers.  Yanked from his quiet life as a museum curator, Billy is unsure of who he should trust amidst competing offers of help and shifting alliances.   A gripping page-turner, this was a perfect read for the beach.

Maybe these reviews are overdue because I am unable to write about either book without making them sound completely bizarre.  Sure, they are that, but these are well written stories, too.  I do not recommend either novel for the science fiction phobic.  If you’re a genre reader, Miéville may be for you.

Overdue Book Review: The Tiger’s Wife

In order for this review to be remotely timely, I would have to have written it when I finished the book way back in March.  March!   What took so long?  I have no idea.  Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife is easily one of my favorite reads of the year so far. This overdue review may be a good thing.  The book got tons of great press early on, but it seems to have fallen off the radar screen.  Back in March (March!), I posted the following on the early reviews for The Tiger’s Wife:

Téa Obreht’s debut novel The Tiger’s Wife is garnering critical acclaim everywhere… Playing the role of “the Russian judge” is Salon with the lone slightly negative review – “…if Obreht narrows her focus and curtails her embellishments, her undeniable flair for storytelling could produce a magnificent novel. Until then, “The Tiger’s Wife” will seduce and confound, fascinate and exasperate.”  That’s the worst thing that’s been written about the novel that I’ve come across.

So let’s call this “an accidentally planned” overdue book review designed to refocus attention on a worthy novel.

The Tiger’s Wife first entered my world as a short story in The New Yorker.  If you’d like a preview of the novel, hunt down that issue.  Téa Obreht is a US immigrant from the Balkans.  The author, only in her late twenties, was named one of The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 and the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35.  That’s a lot of hype to live up to for a young, debut novelist.  Luckily, The Tiger’s Wife is up to the task.

The novel takes place in the Balkan states that comprised the former Yugoslavia.  Natalia,  a young doctor, travels to the neighboring state on a medical mission to inoculate children and to investigate the circumstances of her grandfather’s death.  Though terminally ill with cancer, the grandfather hides it from his wife (but not Natalia) and seemingly chooses to die in a strange town far from his home in a neighboring country.

Along her journey, Natalia remembers the stories that her grandfather told her as a child.  Fact and fable are seemingly intermingled in his stories.  The story of the tiger’s wife mythologizes the actual bombing of the Belgrade zoo by Germans in World War II that resulted in the escape of a tiger into the countryside.  Another story, the tale of the deathless man, seems to mirror the grandfather’s acceptance of death as his life and medical practice mature.  Natalia also discovers similar myths among the local people while on her medical mission.  These local myths have at least some basis in reality and are even being actively perpetuated by some in the community that recognize the healing powers of the myths.

The idea of storytelling as a means to make sense of the chaos in the world around us is a central theme of this novel.  Reading The Tiger’s Wife, I was reminded of a reading that I attended by Aleksandar Hemon, another author from the former Yugoslavia. As a way of explaining to a US audience just how much turmoil the region has experienced, Hemon noted that none of his recent ancestors had died in the same country that they were born in – most of them had not moved.  Clearly that kind of turmoil can create emotional havoc.  Stories and fables, Obreht seems to suggest, are essential not just for understanding, but also for survival.

This is a fantastic novel.  Obreht is very deserving of all the pre-publication hype, and I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Overdue Book Review: Ten Thousand Saints

It would have been timely had I reviewed Eleanor Henderson’s wonderful novel Ten Thousand Saints on the heels of compiling a Spotify playlist of the music mentioned in the music a few weeks back.  That didn’t happen.  Alas, it’s another overdue book review.

I have always been a big fan of the intersection of music and fiction.  The cover of Ten Thousand Saints has blurbs by novelist Ann Patchett (Bel Canto) and musician/memoirist Dean Wareham (Black Postcards).  Wareham narrates the book’s trailer, too.  If you’ve been paying attention around here, you’ll know that Wareham carries a lot of weight for me. (I reviewed his memoir at Largehearted Boy and added a musical companion to the review here.) It wasn’t really a matter of if I’d read this novel but when.

As it happens, Ten Thousand Saints is set in the eighties straight edge scene – a splinter off of punk that I’d heard of but wasn’t very familiar with.  The straight edge kids were notable for their militant stance against drinking, smoking, eating meat, and sex.  It was common at the time for bouncers to mark underage kids hands with an X in magic marker so they wouldn’t be served alcohol at all ages shows.  Hardcore straight edge kids would tattoo the X on their hands to show that they were against the very idea of being served, regardless of their age.  If you are wondering what kind of teenage hell results in that particularly extreme form of rebellion, you have an idea of what Ten Thousand Saints holds in store.

The book begins in Vermont of all places.  Teddy and Jude are two rural teenage burnouts from broken homes who are going nowhere fast. They escape boredom and the promise of a dim future by getting high and setting themselves apart as outcasts.

Jude was the one in Converse high-tops, the stars Magic Markered into pentagrams, and he wore his red hair in a devil lock–short in the back and long in the front, in a fin that sliced between his eyes to his chin.  Unless you’d heard of the Misfits, not the Marilyn Monroe movie but the horror rock/glam-punk band, and if you were living in Lintonburg, Vermont in 1987, you probably hadn’t, you’d never seen anything like it.

Too broke for pot, they usually resort to huffing whatever they can get their hands on.  Their dream is to get out of Vermont as soon as possible and join Teddy’s half-brother, a musician and tattoo artist,  in New York City.  A fateful New Year’s Eve gone wrong, results in a pregnant girl and Teddy’s death.

Set even further adrift by Teddy’s death, Jude ends up being sent to live with his father in the rough and tumble Manhattan neighborhood of  St Mark’s Place.  His father,  a former Vermont hippie and current pot dealer extraordinaire, is clearly not the ideal role model but they are able to coexist – for a while.  A chance encounter with Johnny leads to Jude’s entry into the straight edge scene.  In the absence of any effectual family involvement, Johnny, Jude, and the pregnant Eliza create a family of sorts among themselves, desperately trying to eke out a place and a future for themselves

The depressed and violent East Village of the late eighties portrayed in the Ten Thousand Saints rises to the level of an additional character in the novel.   They details ring so true, I kept waiting for Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe (Just Kids vintage)  to make a cameo.  Almost unbelievably, tattooing was illegal in the New York City of the time.  The AIDS epidemic was still a new and baffling development just beginning to make its presence known on a wider scale.  The homeless and poor residents in the East Village rallied around Tompkins Square Park as the epicenter of the battle of the neighborhood against encroaching gentrification, which resulted in the Tompkins Square Riot.  The chaos of the city mirrors the upheaval in the lives of our young punks and features prominently in their story.

Ten Thousand Saints has been called this year’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.  While both deal with some of the harsh realities of the music business, I think that Ten Thousand Saints is clearly the better book.  Saints is cohesive, where Goon Squad is disjointed. More importantly, Ten Thousand Saints is a novel with heart.  I loved it.

Overdue Book Review: The Submission

Timeliness is everything.  It may have been nice to review Amy Waldman’s The Submission after seeing her read at The Decatur Book Festival.  Having blown that, squeezing it in before the 10th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attack would have been timely, too.  Better late than never I suppose, which is going to be the theme of this week at BGB.

In the Submission, Waldman creates a convincing alternative historyof our last decade.   In the novel, an unspecified terrorist attack by Islamic fundamentalists has occurred in New York City.  An independent commission assigned to choose among blind submissions for a memorial to be built on the site of the attack wrestles with making a worthy selection.  The winning submission comes down to one championed by an art critic and one championed by a widow of the attack.  The process plays out and only then is the winning submission revealed to be a promising young architect raised in Virginia – who happens to me Muslim.  A predictable media firestorm ensues.

Waldman tells the story from multiple viewpoints, including the widow, the families of other victims (including an illegal Muslim immigrant), the winning architect, Muslim advocacy groups, a talk radio host, the fictional mayor and Governor, and the man chosen to lead the commission.  As the story progresses and the media circus escalates, the viewpoints of the main players are tested, as are those of the reader, in what should be a straightforward problem.

My own reaction to media shitstorms is to ignore the ever-ratcheting rhetoric of the 24-hour news outlets and talk radio echo chamber, preferring to read the thoughts of a select few rationale commentators.  Waldman doesn’t allow the reader that out.  The reader is carried deeper into the chaos as it swirls around the explosive issue.  It makes for uncomfortable reading at times, no matter what side of the political divide you may be on.

Waldman is a journalist, and she has served as the New York Times South Asia Bureau Chief .  She began writing her book in 2003, and it seems a little prescient and a little sad how closely her novel mirrors events like the “Ground Zero mosque” episode and the conflict of the actual architect selected to design the 9/11 memorial.   The great accomplishment of this novel is its unflinching ability to hold a mirror up to our paranoid post-9/11 society with a journalists eye for detail.  This is a thought-provoking novel that excels at documenting our collective frame of mind in a particular time and place.

The Family Fang

My wife and I clearly have different tastes in literature.  It’s not a question of right or wrong or whose taste is better, they’re just different.  One clear point of differentiation is that she really likes sci-fi/fantasy/vampire stuff and has read every series I’ve ever heard of in those genres; I, on the other hand, have tried a few times and bailed on various attempts in those veins.  So naturally, when she recommended that I read The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson, I was rather dismissive, assuming it was a vampire book.  When she explained that it wasn’t, I opted to give it a try.  Good move on my part.

As noted, The Family Fang is most certainly not about vampires; rather, it is about a family with the last name Fang who are performance artists (or at least that’s how the parents, Caleb and Camille, would describe themselves).  Caleb and his younger wife/former student Camille, have dedicated their lives to art — not conventional art, but rather creating provacative situations that elicit reactions from unsuspecting people.  They refer to them as “happenings”, and these events take plenty of planning and scheming and are sprung on the general public in shopping malls or other public gathering places.  When Caleb and Camille have children, they are determined to incorporate their children, Annie and Buster, into their act.

The book focuses on Annie and Buster (also known as “A” and “B”, references to the roles they play in the various happenings), through a series of flashbacks intermingled with current events.  Both of the children are reluctant to participate in the lifestyle dictated by their parents, but they do as they are told.  As they grow older and mature, the tension between their parents’ wants and needs and their own individual passions and desires seems to drive a rift in the family.  Annie goes on to become a successful actress (and somewhat of a head case), and Buster becomes a struggling writer.

When circumstances compel the two children to return home to Caleb and Camille, the divide between parents and children evidences itself in the most extreme fashion — Caleb and Camille step out one day but don’t return.  When a grisly crime scene is traced back to them with evidence that they may have been the victims of a roadside killer, Annie and Buster are initially convinced that it’s merely another event staged by their parents.  As the police struggle to solve the crime, Annie and Buster begin their own investigation based on the assumption that their parents are pulling the wool over the public’s eyes.  With pretty hilarious and entertaining results.

Big thumbs up for this book.  Well written, with unique characters and a page-turning story.  Whether you like vampires or not, I think you’ll like this one.

The Unnamed

I read Joshua Ferris’s first novel And Then We Came to the End (read my review), which interested me mostly because I work in the advertising industry (which was the arena for that novel).  I wasn’t blown away by the story, but I also didn’t not like it.  I was kind of satisfied but underwhelmed.

Well, when I read the description of his second novel, The Unnamed, I couldn’t turn myself away.  The Unnamed tells the story of Tim Farnsworth, a successful New York City trial attorney who lives in the suburbs with his wife and daughter.  Tim suffers from a disorder that no one — not one of the experts anywhere in the world — can diagnose or treat; when it hits him, he starts walking and cannot stop himself.  He seems to go in and out of remission, but when it hits, it turns his entire world upside down because he can’t predict when an episode will happen or where it will lead him.  He usually ends up waking up behind a gas station somewhere and calling his wife to have her come pick him up.

As someone who suffers from Restless Legs Sydrome (I swear it’s real), I immediately empathized with Tim.  Not that my condition leaves me naked and shivering next to a dumpster in New Jersey very often, but at least I can relate to having your body do things that are completely outside of your control.  And with him, there wasn’t an easy prescription remedy to control it, and no one could discern whether it was mental, physiological, or both.  It got to the point where they were chaining him to his bed (I can’t imagine the agony of being restrained like that).

When our story starts, Tim’s condition had seemed to have gone away, but it returns, and he and his wife and daughter struggle to figure out how best to manage it as it not only disrupts his domestic life, but also his professional life.  As the story progresses, Ferris throws in a couple of red herrings here and there that I was disappointed weren’t resolved, but still I was riveted to the page trying to figure out what would happen to Tim.  The title of the book could refer to Tim’s undiagnosable condition, or it could refer to his alter ego, who emerges partway through the book as the enemy that Tim feels he’s facing.

Tim eventually embarks on a solo journey to try to beat The Unnamed, and much of the second half of the book tries to get inside his head as he struggles with reality and ownership of his actions.  I’ll admit that I wasn’t thrilled with the way the story resolved itself, but I also didn’t throw my Nook against the wall.  Ferris is a good writer, with a good idea for stories; I just wish I could relate a little better to how he ends them.

The Magician King

Lev Grossman has been in the literary news lately for his defense of the fantasy genre as relevant and important for adult readers.  Not content to merely offer up his opinion on the matter, Grossman has been making a strong case for his argument with two incredibly strong novels, The Magicians (see my glowing  review) and its follow-up The Magician King.   Billed by some as “Harry Potter meets Narnia for grown-ups”, this reductionist description misses much of the subtlety and artistry that make this two book series (so far) so amazing.   The Magician King is an excellent novel that works on many levels.  It’s an homage to classic fantasy novels,  it’s top shelf social commentary, and, most imporantly, it’s a ripping good story.

The Magician King begins shortly after when The Magicians left off.  (Quit reading now to avoid potential spoilers of how the first book ends.) Quentin and three other young magicians now reign as the kings/queens of the magical land of Fillory.  It quickly becomes apparent to Quentin that being the king of a magical world is not necessarily a thrill a minute.  He notes than even when he…

…tried to get serious about something, there turned out not to be much to be serious about. It was all ritual pop and cirumstance. Even money was just for show…The others had all but given up on trying to make themselves useful, but Quentin couldn’t  let it go.  Maybe that was what was nagging at him, as he stood on the edge of that meadow in the woods. There must be something real somewhere out there, but he could never quite seem to get his hands on it.

A routine tax matter comes up for the kingdon, and Qurntic turns it into an epic quest – just to have something to do. Along the way, the quest becomes very real, and the fate of Fillory hangs in the balance.

The narrative alternates between Quentin’s quest and the backstory of one of the queens, Julia.  In the first book Quentin was chosen to attend Brakebills an elite “college of magical pedagogy.”  Julia was left behind but became a magician anyway through incredible self-sacrifice and courage.  A hint of Julia’s desperateness to become a magician and the ruthless path she undertook to achieve her goal are hinted at in this quote from the novel.  The emotional cost of Julia’s journey becomes apparent as the novel progresses.

In my review of the first book I suggested that a thematic undercurrent of the novel was Grossman’sexploration of the  ”…the transition from adolescence through college and into the job market [adulthood], especially among “elite” students.”  With Julia’s story, I felt that Grossman was continuing the thematic thread (as I saw it) while developing it further by adding the element of social class to the story.

I feel it’s important to note that both novels are just plain fun to read.  Much of the fun in the novels comes from picking up on the allusions to other novels.  The characters in these novels are also aware of the fantasy canon and pop culture and often reference it to describe the situations that they are in.  The novels, despite their magical subject, are also rooted in the reality of this world and time.  I laughed out loud when a character mentioned that she used magic to jailbreak her iPhone.  Grossman also gets occasional digs into the literature-must-be-realism crowd with barbs like this:

It had the feel of a scene from a novel written by an earnest realist who was more concerned with presenting an amalgamation of naturalistic details that fit together plausibly than with telling a story that wouldn’t bore the fuck out of the reader.

You may be asking yourself, “Do I need to read The Magicians first?  Or can I just dive right into The Magician King?”  Yes. You need to read The Magicians first.  You’ll be able to understand the words on the page of The Magician King without reading Magicians first, but you’ll be doing yourself a large disservice.  With these novels, it is all about the journey.

Grossman confirmed that there will be a third novel in this series.  If it were available for pre-order today, I’d hand over my money now.

Atlanta reader bonus:  Lev Grossman is reading tonight, August 29, at the Barnes and Noble in Buckhead.  7PM.  I’m there.

The Old Man and the Sea

I have to admit, I am absolutely dumbfounded at how little Hemingway I’ve read.  I read The Sun Also Rises a couple years ago (a copy I had purchased on my honeymoon in 1996 but had never bothered to read until recently) and felt like I got it; I figured out what all the fuss was about and why Hemingway was so highly-regarded.  Why I didn’t immediately line up the rest of his works in the queue is a mystery to me.  Hemingway’s ability to evoke imagery in the reader’s mind is unparalleled in my experience.

After some fits and starts and failures, beginning some books that didn’t resonate with me at all, I decided to go back to Hemingway, whose The Old Man and the Sea was perfect for my short attention span.  Not to mention that it won the Pulitzer in 1952 and was a driving force behind Hemingway’s receipt of the Nobel Prize.

The story tracks our hero, Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who has gone 84 days without catching anything.  He concocts a plan to go farther out to sea to try to catch the big one; when he actually catches a huge marlin, it drags his little boat even farther out to sea over the course of two days.  Hemingway tells the story of the epic battle between the two with such precision and with such detail to the specific tools Santiago uses and actions he takes that you can’t help but believe Hemingway himself was a fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico for thirty years.

This story is absolutely spellbinding, even if I wasn’t familiar with some of the nautical and angling terminology.  It was simply breathtaking to follow Santiago as his mental and physical limits are stretched beyond anything I’ll ever experience.  And the metaphor reflected by what happens to Santiago and the marlin is so moving and heartbreaking that I see it in every sad tale I’ve heard since, whether real or fictional.

You can bet your skiff that I’ll be lining up some more Hemingway soon.  I’ve decided that he will be the fallback whenever I hit a dry spell, because I know I can count on him.

That Book by Nabokov

After seeing that a survey of NY Times book critics had named Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, as the best work of fiction of the past 100 years, and knowing that I had heard Nabokov mentioned in song and that a band I like called Clare Quilty was named after a character in the book, how could I resist?  And that sort of sums up our narrator, Humbert Humbert, who is obsessed with young girls (whom he refers to as “nymphets”).

Nabokov is a good writer –  that many critics can’t be wrong.  However, the most striking thing about this novel is not Nabokov’s writing ability, but rather that the book was first published in 1955 in France and then in 1958 in the U.S.  The central point of the story is Humbert Humbert’s fixation on young girls, and eventually on one in particular, Dolores Haze (whom he nicknames “Lolita”).  While that concept may not seem particularly shocking today, I suspect it was as controversial as just about anything you could come up with during that era.  What a brave, gutsy venture by Nabokov.

Without giving the details of the story away (as if there’s anyone other than me who hadn’t read this before), suffice it to say that the things our narrator does to get close to Lolita are astounding.  And even more astounding is that as he rejiggers his entire life to be near her, the reader feels perversely sympathetic to him — he is our protagonist.  Yet stepping back, objectively, he is a disgusting human being who should be entitled to no feelings from us other than disgust, hatred, and anger.  And I imagine that is the beauty of the book and the reason the critics swoon over it — that Nabokov can essentially trick the reader into having feelings for this monster.

I honestly had a little bit of a struggle tracking the storyline here, knowing where our characters were and where they were going, but it didn’t really bother me.  I was turning pages as fast as I could to see where things were going.  And not — I repeat NOT — because I was excited to read some filthy pedophilic erotica, but rather because I was absolutely fascinated by this character (Humbert Humbert, not Lolita).  And the interesting thing to me is that there isn’t any “filth” in this book.  There’s conceptual filth, but not literal filth — there are no sex scenes per se, although conjugal relations are talked about — and so none of the words themselves are “dirty.”  And as I said before, it’s amazing how wrapped up you can get in such offensive subject matter without being offended, because of Nabokov’s gift for telling the tale through the eyes of our narrator.

I personally wouldn’t call this the best work of fiction of the last 100 years, but hey — I’m not a qualified critic.  I will say, though, that I feel a great sense of value and reward as I check the box on having read this one.

Update:  When we posted this, we didn’t know that Lolita was published on this date in 1958 nor did we know that it was “first book since Gone with the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in the first three weeks of publication.”

The Red Umbrella

Had I known the subject of The Red Umbrella by Christina Diaz Gonzalez, prior to reading Barnacle Love, I could have written a great comparison between the two.  Both deal with individuals moving to a new land – trying to fit in.  In Barnacle Love, the main character has a difficult time of it, and the ending isn’t happy or warm and fuzzy.  Ms. Gonzalez however, brings us a YA novel with a more pleasant ending that I enjoyed.

Unbeknownst to me, in 1961 thousands of parents loaded their children onto boats and planes to escape the communist changes of the Cuban revolution.  This event was called Operation Pedro Pan.  Ms. Gonzalez’s parents were part of this exodus and their story was the inspiration for The Red Umbrella.

Fourteen year old Lucia and her younger brother, Frankie, are living a very comfortable, carefree life in Cuba until they notice soldiers all over town.  Their father loses his job as a government official and after returning from an unexplained absence is forced to find work as a manual laborer.

Lucia just wants to be a normal girl.  She tries to engage her best friend, but she attends the Communist youth camps, and is obsessed with Castro and the great changes he is bringing to the people of Cuba.

Lucia’s parents manage to secure visas for the kids and they are shipped to the United States – alone.  They spend a few months at a a camp in Florida and thanks to some connections, both are lucky enough to travel to the same foster family in Nebraska.

While in Nebraska Lucia confronts the same challenges as all teenage girls.  In addition to her coming of age issues, Lucia has to deal with the issues of being different and not knowing if she’ll ever see her parents again.

Although Lucia tells a story that relates to teenagers of any era, this isn’t 2011, it is 1961.  Leave it to Beaver was still on the airwaves.  This was also the age of The Kennedy’s, space exploration, the Cold War, West Side Story and Breakfast at Tiffany’s – a more naïve part of our history when international travel was not common for most Americans.  Cubans, in particular, were treated with a bit of caution due to the events surrounding the Bay of Pigs.

Lucia has a few rebellious moments during her self discovery, but manages to keep her head up and stay positive.

Ms. Gonzalez brought me to tears throughout The Red Umbrella.  As a mother, I can not imagine sending my child away with the uncertainty that I may never see her again. Also as an adult, I would have enjoyed learning more about this period in Cuba’s history through the story, but, the book wasn’t written for me, the adult. It was written for the young adult.

The Red Umbrella would be a great addition to a young adult’s libryary.  Reading about someone else’s struggles can be very therapeutic.  Throw in some Cuban and American history and our YAs will become more worldly.  I’m hanging onto this one for my daughter.