I devoured Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. I sat down and read it and did not get  up for anything. This book is great. Estep’s charming and down-dirty story about lucky and plucky Alice, her clumsy sister Eloise, and their dog-rescuing, ex-junkie mother, presents the hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking ways people intertwine, overlap and just plain run over each other in the acts of love, friendship, sex, and gambling — and all other acts of resistance.

This book is wonderful because of its fabulous characters and delicious plot, all sprung from Estep’s original and uninhibited mind.  The people of this novel are maybe not wholly believable but I took them as mythical members of the wild and crazy New York universe and went willingly along on the spin-of-the-wheel ride of their lives.  Free will — and these women are wilful — meets those little flips of fate that round out into destiny, or sometimes just a one-night stand. The struggle facing our characters is the age-old mandate to connect (”just connect”) and the obstacles they face are the tried and true Guilt, Pleasure, and Duty.

The characters didn’t need the catalyst of the mother’s big secret to get moving.  They are never static and their movement brings change: forward marching, then retracting, then forward again, they  lurch on, rapacious and certain, then stop, regroup, become subdued and questioning.  All three of them face their own crisis of the heart and confrontation of the soul.  We admire them (I loved them) for being forced to look into the mirror and reacting so very honestly to what they see.

Estep is adept with words.  Her sisters and their mother are each narrator of different chapters and they all speak with distinct cadences and linguistic choices: we know them as well as by their rhythms and words as by their actions. Estep’s physical descriptions are right on and perfect: “The sky over Aqueduct was the color of dead television.”  She is often hilarious: “Her eyes were bright and her big curly hair had, I swear, gotten bigger and curlier.  She was verging on looking like Malcolm Gladwell.”  Estep can write great one liners, real Oscar Wilde zingers, like my favorite: “She has led an unconventional life and it has agreed with her.”  I wouldn’t mind that as my epitaph.

Read this great book about sisters and mothers and friends and lovers, and sex, dogs, food, and gambling.  It will leave you reaching out and grabbing hold of someone or some dog or some idea.  You’ll bake yourself a cake with white icing, you’ll commit to skinny dipping at least once a summer, and you’ll never, ever bet on a race unless you’ve done the homework.  Alice Fantastic will inspire you to take the gamble of your life and run with it.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch on readallday.org

Published by Akashic Books - paperback  -978-1933354811 - $15.95

Breathing in Art

Reading Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark is like breathing in art, instead of air.  It’s in the words chosen by the author, in Thea’s artistic pursuit of her voice (a lark, of course, known for its beautiful songs), and in Thea’s love of the painting, ”The Song of the Lark,” by French painter Jules Breton.  Here on the cover, it was painted in 1884, and now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, perhaps since 1894.  The book was published in 1915.

Thea describes the painting:

“But in that same room there was a picture–oh, that was the thing she ran upstairs so fast to see!  That was her picture…She liked even the name of it, “The Song of the Lark.”  The flat country, the early morning light, the wet fields, the look in the girl’s heavy face–well, they were all hers, anyhow, whatever was there.  She told herself that that picture was ‘right.’  Just what she meant by this, it would take a clever person to explain.  But to her the word covered the almost boundless satisfaction she felt when she looked at the picture.”

Toward the end of the novel, Thea says:  “I had lived a long, eventful life, and an artist’s life, every hour of it.  Wagner says, in his most beautiful opera, that art is only a way of remembering youth.  And the older we grow the more precious it seems to us, and the more richly we can present that memory.”

When the novel opens, Thea is eleven.  We meet her first as a child.  Late in the book, she says, “A child’s attitude toward everything is an artist’s attitude.”  Henri Matisse, years later, emphasizes this point in his famous essay, “Looking at Life with the Eyes of a Child.”  The artist, he writes, must look at everything “as though he were seeing it for the first time:  he has to look at life as he did when he was a child.”

Thea says, “They save me: the old things, things like the Kohlers’ garden.  They are in everything I do.”  It’s her being able to reach them, inside herself , that allows her to come into the fullness of her voice.

Reviewed by Cynthia Newberry Martin at Catching Days which is one of Powell’s Books’ “Lit Blogs We Love.”

Publisher by Wilder Publications - paperback - 978-1604595109 - $12.95

Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin is one of most intense, disturbing, well-written, and deeply affecting books I have ever read. I finished it in awe of Shriver’s considerable writing talent, as well as the horrifyingly real, unforgettable story she created. I’ve struggled with this review, which is unlike me - usually I am eager to write about a book as soon as I finish it. With Kevin, though, I have found myself starting this review over and over, not entirely sure how to talk about it without giving too much away, while still giving it the credit it is due.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is the story of Eva, a woman who entered motherhood with deep ambivalence and gave birth to Kevin, a difficult baby with whom she never bonded. The book is told through letters from Eva to her husband, Franklin, in which she looks back on their marriage, Kevin’s birth, and his difficult childhood and adolescence, recounting with frank honesty her experience as a mother.

Kevin is more than just a difficult child, however - he is deeply disturbed and, in the end, psychopathic. The book culminates with him executing a mass murder at his high school - a fact that is revealed in the first chapter. His first 15 years of existence are filled with incidents that grow increasingly more hateful and demonic, and the book explores how Eva feels about her son, her role as his mother, her possible cuplability in how he turned out, and her relationship with Franklin, who consistently turns a blind eye to Kevin’s evil nature and the danger he poses to his family. There is some truly horrifying stuff in here, which I won’t reveal in this review for fear of spoiling it for readers.

I know people who won’t read this book based on the subject matter, and I can understand why. But they are missing out on Shriver’s writing. She is a beautiful, eloquent writer, as I also learned from her most recent book, The Post Birthday World (reviewed here). Here is just one passage out of many that I marked purely for their craftsmanship:

[On] the birth of both of my chidren, I could immediately discern a dominant emotional tone, like the top note of a chord or the foreground color of a canvas. In Kevin, the note was the shrill high pitch of a rape whistle, the color was a pulsing, aortal red, and the feeling was fury.  The shriek and pump of all that rage was unsustainable, so as he grew older the note would descend to the uninflected blare of a leaned-on car horn; the paint in the foreground would gradually thicken, its hue coagulating to the sluggish black-purple of liver, and his prevailing emotion would subside from fitful wrath to steady, unabating resentment.

So, what is the purpose of this book, other than being what is at heart a real-life horror story? It is a thorough, modern examination of motherhood, the nature of the sacrifice of identity, and of course, an exploration of the role that parents play in shaping their children. Was Kevin’s personality ultimately a product of Eva’s ambivalence? Or was her tortured introduction to motherhood caused by a son whose antisocial and alienating personality was formed in the womb? Were Kevin’s actions meant to impress his mother, punish her, or neither? What loyalty do parents owe to their children, even at their own great personal expense?

I feel like I could go on and on about this book and still never exhaust my thoughts and questions.

Reviewed by Gayle Weiswasser of Everyday I Write the Book - Because who has time to figure out what to read? (a sentiment Readiac supports

Published by Harper Perennial - paperback - 978-0061124297 - $13.99

I’m a little afraid of short stories. What I crave most in fiction is depth, characterization, richly drawn and fully fleshed-out people and places — not halved and truncated stories of people about whom I will ultimately feel nothing, if only because I never really got a chance to know them.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s stunning Interpreter of Maladies is seriously working to change my opinion.

I don’t know what took me so long to pick up this book, exactly; Lahiri’s novel The Namesake is probably my favorite book of all time. Seriously. It was the first book I set down after reading and thought, “If I’m going to be a writer, this is what I have to be. How can I be this?” And not to put a damper on my dreams, but I don’t think anyone could write like Lahiri — simultaneously combining themes of love, family, respect, devotion, rebellion, fear, desperation, loneliness and hope in, oh, twenty pages or so.

I won’t wax poetic for the entire review, I promise. The basics? Interpreter of Maladies is comprised of nine individual short stories, all dealing with similar themes (mentioned above) and centering around the quest for love, acceptance and family. All of the characters center around themes of immigration; what it means to be “Indian” (as opposed to Bengali, American, etc.); ideas of leaving behind the past in order to form a new identity in the present; how it is that we love and lose each other. And so forth. We are greeted by a variety of narrators — some telling the story themselves, some with omniscient narrators weaving the tale apart from the crowd.

Each story bears the commonality of the experience, to me, of loving someone from afar: whether because you are from different countries and cultures, speak different languages, are of a different faith, have different values or are just . . . entirely different people. Of all the stories, I found “Sexy” and “When Mr. Pirzada Came To Dine” to be the most moving. But that’s like choosing a favorite child — each story is special, unique and complex in its own way. It’s impossible to just pick one.

And from the first few sentences of each narrative, we’re introduced to people who seem just as tangible as if they were standing in front of me by a taxi or in a living room or across a restaurant. I eagerly flipped through the pages, wondering who I would meet next. Each tale was an adventure. Would we be in New England, New York City, India — in a taxi, at a monument, in a living room, raking leaves in the yard? I felt an immediate connection with each of the story’s characters, and felt sad and nostalgic by the time I reached the final page of “The Third and Final Continent.” It made me want to read The Namesake all over again. And perhaps I will.

Pick up this book. I’m pretty sure this is why I read literature.

5 out of 5!

Reviewed by Megan, a writer whose very fine book related blog is Write Meg! Another take on reading, writing, loving and eating.

Mariner Books - paperback - 978-0395927205 - $14.95

Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or find a local bookstore at Indie Bound.

A Thousand Splendid Suns is another remarkable story from Khaled Hosseini. Like the Kite Runner, this book is set against the backdrop of turbulent times in Afghanistan, but unlike Hosseini’s first novel, ATSS focuses on female relationships; about love and loss and endurance, making it a superb choice for a book club.

I’m going to try to summarize the book without giving the whole story away, but if you plan to read this anytime soon, you might want to stop here and skip to the last couple paragraphs.

The two main female characters are Mariam and Laila. The novel begins when Mariam, a harami (illegitimate child), is 15 years old. After her mother’s suicide she goes to live with her wealthy father, his 3 wives and their 10 children. Soon she is married off to Rasheed, a much older man.

Mariam can’t catch a break. First her mother kills herself, then she’s treated as a second class citizen by her own father, then she’s married off to an old, abusive man who doesn’t allow her to have friends, talk to people, or show her face in public, and who beats her on a regular basis because she is unable to give him a son. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Laila, a smart and stunning young girl born to one of Mariam and Rasheed’s neighbors shortly after they marry, grows up and falls in love with her childhood friend, Tariq. When the political situation in Kabul starts heating up, his parents decide it’s time to move to Pakistan. He begs Laila to come, but she stays behind with her parents. They have a quick “indiscretion” before he goes, shocking each other with its intensity. After Tariq’s departure, Laila’s parents decide they, too, should leave Kabul. As they are packing up, a bomb hits their house, destroying their home, killing her parents and badly injuring Laila.

Rasheed and Mariam take 14 year old Laila in. Mariam nurses her back to health. Soon the disgusting Rasheed decides he’d like to have Laila as his 2^nd wife. Learning Tariq has been killed, Laila, harboring a secret, agrees to marry the old man. In my head, I was screaming, NO! He’ll hurt you! But it was the only way for her to survive after losing everyone she had to count on. Women had no freedoms, weren’t allowed to work, travel without a male chaperone, etc. How would she support herself? So they marry, and then Laila has the audacity to give birth to a female child.  Rasheed loses whatever kind feelings he had for her at that point. But then the two wives, after some initial tension, form an unbreakable, familial bond that will endure huge challenges and obstacles.

Spanning almost three decades, from about 1975 until just a few years ago, there are a lot of historical events happening throughout the story. The political unrest worsens as the Taliban take over and women are more oppressed than ever. I felt huge empathy for these women and their lack of freedom and basic rights. I related to their maternal sides, their protectiveness toward Laila’s children and toward each other.

I loved this book. As brutal and intense as some of it was (particularly in Rasheed’s final scene), it spoke to me on a deep emotional level. I cared about these characters. I desperately wanted things to work out for them. I’m no expert on Afghanistan history or culture, but it’s possible that the portrayal of some of the characters was a bit stereotypical (actually, that would be my only criticism of the book-it’s beautifully written).

Khaled Hosseini is a brilliant storyteller. If you love a good story that isn’t all sunshine and roses, this might be the book for you. It’s number one on my list of Favorite Reads of 2008!

This Readiac Review is by Lisa Munley whose great site Books on the Brain is here.

Published by Riverhead - 978-1594483851 - $16.00 - paperback

(other editions available)

Buy it here