After the Fire

 

After the Fire by Henning Mankell translated by Marlaine Delargy  401 pp. 

This was the last novel written by Henning Mankell, author of the Kurt Wallender books, before his death in 2015. This novel is not part of the Wallender series. Fredrik Welin retired from his job as a surgeon under a cloud from a botched surgery. He moved into the family home on a small island in an archipelago off the Swedish coast. One night he wakes to a blinding light and discovers his home is on fire. He escapes with the clothes on his back, a raincoat, and two left boots. Soon he is under suspicion of burning the house for the insurance money. And Fredrik develops a love interest in a local journalist who was writing about the fire. However, while Fredrik is away in Paris, rescuing his daughter from jail, another island home burns to the ground in the same way. Fredrik is no longer a suspect but now there is an arsonist in this quiet, secluded part of Sweden. This is not Mankell's best work. It's a bit rambling and drags in spots. However, there is enough going on to make you want to continue reading to find out how it is going to end.

Let's Never Talk About This Again

 

Let's never talk about this again / Sara Faith Alterman, read by the author, 266 pgs.

Raised in a very strict household where her parents wanted their kids to learn no cuss words, hear anything about the concept of sex, or listen to up-to-date music, the author was poking around one day and found something interesting.  A bunch of "sex" books, many with illustrations, that were written by her father.  She spent her childhood sneak reading the books but never asking about them.  When her father develops Alzheimer's, and money problems, he tries to get her to co-author another crop of these books.  This memoir has its very funny moments and the author does a great job narrating her own book but I didn't find it compelling enough to recommend widely. 

Good riddance

Good riddance / Elinor Lipman, read by Mia Barron, 290 pgs.

Newly divorced Daphne never really understood her mom's obsession with an old yearbook from her first year of teaching.  Sure, she was the year book adviser and the book was dedicated to her.  She used it to keep notes on the class whose reunions she attended.  When the yearbook is left to Daphne when her mom dies, she keeps it for a year then throws it in the recycle bin in her apartment.  The neighbor down the hall is a documentary film maker, she finds the yearbook, decodes some of the notes and decides it would make a great story for her to research.  Now, with her mom's reputation on the line (turns out some of those notes were a bit catty), Daphne needs to figure out how to put the brakes on this project. A bit of hilarity ensues as Daphne makes things up on the fly, deals with her widowed dad moving from New Hampshire to an apartment 5 blocks away, and discovering something very interesting about one of her mother's ex-students.  Luckily, the neighbor across the way is available for a romantic interlude.  Fun to read and not take too seriously.  The audio is excellently narrated by Mia Barron.

The parking lot attendant

The parking lot attendant / Nafkote Tamirat, read by Bhani Turpin, 225 pgs.

On the mysterious island of B____, our protagonist tells the story of how she and her introvert father ended up there.  The story starts in Boston where the Ethiopian community is kind of closed off.  Our unnamed girl falls under the spell of Ayale, an enigmatic parking lot attendant that shows her a lot of attention but also uses her.  He takes advantage of her youth, inexperience and loneliness.  She isn't really sure of the bigger plot but she knows it is nefarious.  As she learns more, she realizes how much danger she is in.  What an interesting story told so well.  As always Bhani Turpin's narrations ADDS to the whole.

Pere Goriot

Pere Goriot / Honore de Balzac, various translations, 274 p.

The November choice for the Read the Classics Book Group, this one generated lots of discussion.  Goriot was one novel in the collection of loosely interconnected works that Balzac entitled The Human Comedy, which, if Wikipedia can be believed, contained 91 completed works including novels, stories, and novellas.  They concern the state of French society at the time of the Bourbon Restoration, after the fall and exile of Napoleon.

Father Goriot lives in a dingy Paris boardinghouse, where he is mocked by his fellow residents for being the poorest among them and for his fanatical love for his high-society daughters.  The reader meets the handsome young law student Rastignac, who lives at the same address and who falls in love with one of Goriot's daughters. Frequently humorous, but a bleak portrayal of human nature, vicious and petty.

A Place for Us

A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza, 385 pages.

The story opens with Amir returning for his sister Hadia
's wedding and then jumps back to Amir, Hadia, and Huda's childhood in California. Their parents, Layla and Rafiq, are devout Muslims and strict parents. Huda and Hadia do their best to please their parents, but Amir chafes at their rules and rebels. Amir blames himself for a lot of his failings as a dutiful son, but as we hear their stories and see the crossroads traveled by the family and the choices they make, we realize that not all the fault is his. But, honestly, most of it is. A pretty good book.

Demon: Volume 4

Demon: Volume 4 by Jason Shiga, 174 pages.

Jason Shiga's extremely, extremely absurd series about immortal beings who escape death by possessing and inhabiting the nearest living body, when the body they had been in expires, continues and adds to the enormous body count. Jimmy, the main demon in the story, estimates that he has killed 6,000,012 people over the course of the series and is therefore worse than Hitler. Jimmy and his daughter discuss what it means to commit to what they are doing; Sweetpea will follow her father's lead in all situations and Jimmy tries to balance making his daughter happy with revenging himself on Hunter, the OSS agent who has tried to really end Jimmy's life.
I really admire Shiga's willingness to explore the rules of his world all the way out as far as he can go. The whole series makes for a relatively quick and fun read.

The Storied Life of AJ Fikry

The Storied Life of AJ Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin, 270 pages.

Our book group choice for November. A. J. Fikry is busy running his bookstore on Alice Island, Island Books, and drinking himself to death. Opening the bookstore had been his wife's idea, but since she died in a traffic accident the joy of it all has gone out of A. J.'s life. As the book begins, A. J. yells at a publisher's rep and his treasured copy of Poe's Tamerlane is stolen.  Everything is going down the drain. He is saved when a small child is left in his care, and when he is given a chance to apologize to and reconnect with the publisher's rep.
This is a sweet and wonderful sort of book, reminiscent of A Man Called Ove, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand and others showing a live saved by unexpected love. The Police Chief's book group and the character of  the local chief Lambiase, are great, as is the series of chapter-beginning book reviews. And the characters of Maya and Amelia add a lot to this enjoyable book. Some twists and turns and more deaths than expected.

The beautiful dead

The beautiful dead by Belinda Bauer read by Andrew Wincott, 341 pgs.

Eve Singer is a crime reporter who stumbles onto the work of a serial killer, then attacks the attention of the killer himself.  Eve is a woman with a lot on her mind.  She is taking care of her dementia suffering dad Duncan while trying to push her career to the next level.  She decides to use the serial just like he is using her, to get ahead.  This book is a thriller but some of the scenes seem pretty ridiculous.  I also thought the reader made Eve seem weak instead of smart and strong so can not recommend the audio version.

Raymie Nightingale

Raymie Nightingale by Kate DiCamillo, 272 pages.

I've read a bunch of Kate DiCamillo's books to my children. This was the first that I have read (or rather listened to) by myself. DiCamillo's books are always interesting even as they are all very different from one another.
Raymie Clarke's father has left home to be with a dental hygienist, and Raymie believes that if he were to see in the newspaper that she has won the upcoming Little Miss Central Florida Tire contest, that he would surely realize what a mistake he has made and he'll return and everything will be alright again. Since she has no idea how to go about winning the contest, she enrolls in classes offered by a local legend in the pageant-winning world in order to learn baton twirling and whatnot. In those classes she meets the two girls who become her friends, Beverly and Louisiana. Each girl is as quirky as Raymie, and though they each have their own agenda, Louisiana to win the contest for the money, and Beverly to sabotage the contest, they join forces to help one another.
A very good book.
This was a Christmas gift for several family members.

H is for Hawk

H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald  300 pp.

This book is an unusual combination of memoir, grief, falconry, and author T.H. White. Helen MacDonald, a naturalist and falconer, is devastated when her father dies suddenly. While coping with her grief and other personal crises she takes on the task of using her falconry skills to train a notoriously difficult raptor, a goshawk. She uses training methods learned from other falconers and from the writings of T.H. White, author of the Arthurian novels The Sword in the Stone and The Once and Future King. White wrote about his ultimately unsuccessful experiences with his bird called Gos and MacDonald comments on him and the errors he had made. Meanwhile she and her bird, Mabel, are having mixed results in training due, in part, to MacDonald's shaky emotional state. I'm having a hard time deciding if I like this book or not. I enjoy reading about and watching birds of prey so the details about the bird were fascinating. The rest...not so much. I give it a mixed review.

Go set a watchman

Go set a watchman / Harper Lee 278 pgs.

Set 20 years after the incomparable To Kill a Mockingbird, Jean Louise Finch visits her father, Atticus.  Jean Louise lives in New York City but is still dating Henry Clinton when she comes to town.  Times are changing and the NAACP is actively pushing civil rights.  The one thing that Jean Louise thinks she KNOWS for sure is her father's commitment to fairness and equality.  This trip is eye opening for Jean Louise because she feels the shift in her small little Southern town of Macomb.  Attitudes are changing and things she thought were sure things in her life are less certain. Jean Louise goes through as many changes on this one trip as have happened in the 20 years since we last saw her as Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird.

There has been a lot of talk about this book and the author.  Is this a legitimate publication, is Lee being taken advantage of, Is Atticus a closet racist instead of the admirable man dedicated to equal justice?  I'm not sure reading this will give you all the answers.  I see it more as the evolution of the relationship between father and daughter, the discovery that everything you thought was black and white when you were a kid may have a lot more gray involved.

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A God in Ruins

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson, 468 pages.

The sequel to the intensely original and equally brilliant  Life after Life reinforces the contention that Atkinson is the best writer going (and I’m sure someone besides me and some of my colleagues are contending this; they gotta be, she just is. I'd be willing to reluctantly accept "among the best . . . ", anyway). This second book tells the tale of Ursula’s younger brother, Teddy. Teddy was a wonderful child, his mother’s favorite, his Aunt Izzie's favorite, his sisters' favorite, and a decent young man. The story jumps back and forth between Teddy’s childhood, his time as a bomber pilot during the war, his later life with Nancy and daughter Viola, and time with his grandchildren, Sunny and Bertie. Each part of Teddy's life is beautifully drawn with heartbreaking detail. 

His time as a pilot of a Halifax bomber spent (at times in vain; the girl in the war office tells him that statistically speaking there's almost no chance for any of the crews to live through their allotted missions) trying to keep his crew alive- caused him to vow that should he make it through the war he would live the remainder of his life as a good and kind person.

He tries to do that, to live a quiet uneventful life,  but as with sister, Ursula, events and episodes in our lives are never as simple as we think.  Viola, Teddy’s angry and self-centered daughter, and his grandchildren are great characters as well, living full lives, deserving books of their own. I'm glad that I read the author's note explaining how this story relates to Ursula's in Life After Life after finishing the book.

Read them both, they are quite the thing for fans of artful and heartfelt storytelling, or fans of anything, really. 

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The weight of blood

The weight of blood / Laura McHugh 306 pgs.

Lucy's friend Cheri disappears and is found murdered a year later. Lucy becomes a bit of a Nancy Drew looking for clues to this crime and feeling bad that Cheri's life was so rough and ended so early.  As she is looking, she is also learning about her mother...another woman who disappeared from Henbane, a Missouri community deep in the Ozark Mountains.  This is the first book by Laura McHugh (whom I met at the Missouri Library Association Conference in October) who lives in Columbia, MO.  The plot explores the relationships between parents and children as well as the larger community.  Lucy is motherless but her father and uncle are protective forces in her life.  She is a teenager now and doesn't feel like she needs protection.  But as she explores her history and the fate of Cheri she is bound to uncover some difficult truths that make her question some things she has always believed. This book has a creepy vibe and some disturbing violence but is an interesting read.

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The Art of Racing in the Rain

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein  321 pp.

Enzo, a Labrador/terrier mix (named for Enzo Ferrari) is the narrator and devoted companion of the story of race car driver Denny Swift. With great insight and a point of view that only a dog could have, Enzo tells Denny's story, recounting his successes, failures, triumphs and tragedies with compassion and philosophical reflection. Enzo also expresses frustration at his inability to communicate with words and his lack of thumbs. The story begins with an elderly Enzo contemplating his own end and his hopes to be reincarnated as a man before telling his life story with Denny from his adoption as a puppy, Denny's marriage, the birth of a daughter, and the tragedy that follows. Enzo has that innate canine ability to judge who is and isn't a good person and laments his inability to protect Denny from those who wish him harm. This book will leave you wondering what your pet is really thinking about you. 

Strings Attached

Strings Attached by Joanne Lipman & Melanie Kupchynsky 324 pp.

Having played violin in my younger days, this book revived many memories, good and bad, of past music teachers. This is the story of a feared and beloved music teacher told by a former student and one of the man's daughters. Jerome (call me Jerry) Kupchynsky was a tyrant to his students but taught them more than just music. Born in the Ukraine, he was a survivor of a Nazi labor camp who came to the U.S., taught music in a school and gave private lessons, cared for an invalid wife, raised his daughters, and searched for one who went missing. He was feared and loved by his students, many of whom gathered together to remember him after his death. He was one of those teachers students never forget and it's a fascinating story.

Wilson

Wilson by Daniel Clowes  77 pp.

This is the tale of a man who is loner who really loves only his dog. He is socially inept at making relationships with others. The rediscovery of his ex-wife and knowledge of a teen-age daughter he never knew he had turns his life upside-down for the worse. Quite frankly, this is a pretty depressing story but their just might be hope for Wilson in the end.

The Sigh / Marjane Satrapi 56 p.

I loved Persepolis and was happy to see a new title from Satrapi. A sweet and comical fairy tale, Sigh doesn't have the heft of her earlier books, dealing as they did with the Iranian revolution. Still, I enjoyed this, and love the quality of her art.