Forward

Forward by Abby Wambach, 230 pages

Abby Wambach is a soccer superstar. With the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team, she's won a World Cup and two gold medals. She also holds the record for most goals in international soccer competition (184), male or female. Forward is her memoir of her soccer career, from when she started playing as a kid, all the way up to her retirement from the sport last year. And while the memoir certainly focuses on the game (both the physicality and the mentality), Wambach also delves into her personal life: her experiences coming out to her family and teammates, her rocky marriage, her addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs.

It's an illuminating, inspiring story, and I appreciate Wambach's candor in telling it. I look forward (no pun intended) to seeing what turns her career takes, now that she's off the field.

The Wonder: a Novel / Emma Donoghue, 291 pp.

Lib, an English nurse and protegee of Florence Nightingale, is hired by a mysterious committee to travel to Ireland to observe the Wonder, a young woman who appears to be surviving without food.  She clashes with the girl's family, local religious authorities, and the Irish culture and landscape generally.  The story is set just 7 years post-Famine, and this is an incredibly bleak portayal.

The narrative has interesting aspects and an initial quality of ominous mystery.  But the plot unfolds in a fairly predictable manner, and the ending 'twist' was visible from quite a long distance.

I haven't read Room; it's interesting to note the similarities here in the theme of children isolated and in danger.

The Story of the Lost Child: The Fourth and final Neapolitan Novel / Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein, 473 p.

Elena returns to Naples with her children.  She returns for a man, but in the end stays for Lila, as she takes a flat in Lila's building.  We see the two women go through the ordinary events of middle age -  raising children, burying parents, drifting away from lovers - and the not-so-ordinary - the murder of childhood friends, the continued impact of organized crime on day-to-day life, and the disappearance of a child.  There are unsolved mysteries here that pull you through the text.  In the end, Elena and Lila felt like my friends, and I hated to say good-bye to them.  An especially gorgeous ending.

The Bassoon King

The Bassoon King: My Life in Art, Faith, and Idiocy by Rainn Wilson  301 pp.

This book begins with an introduction by Dwight Schrute, the character Rainn Wilson plays on the television show "The Office". Wilson details his life with hippie parents, growing up into the nerdiest of nerds -- yes, he played bassoon -- his entry into the world of acting, the creation of SoulPancake.com, and his career so far. Included in his autobiographical tale is the way his faith/spirituality (Baha'i) has shaped his life and his approach to his art. This was a bit of a slow starter that eventually picked up the pace into an enjoyable read. I actually found much of the spirituality part to be quite interesting because it wasn't an attempt to convert anyone to his belief system.

Slade House

Slade House by David Mitchell  238 pp.

There is a strange house that only appears every nine years. You find it by walking down a narrow alley near a pub to a short iron door in the alley's brick wall. The door is unlocked and once inside the garden, you are met by a friendly stranger. Soon you are liking the place and happy to be there, until you discover that you can't leave...ever. Who are the mysterious twins who have learned mysterious and mystical knowledge from around the world and why are the strange paintings of the missing victims eyeless? The story is creepy but not blood, guts, and gore horror. During the whole thing the lyrics of "Hotel California," "You can check out any time you want but you can never leave..." kept running through my head.

Today Will Be Different

Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple, 259 pages

Eleanor Flood was once the Emmy-nominated animation director of a hit TV show. These days, the only thing she's working on is memorizing a poem a week, shuttling her son back and forth to his private school, walking her lazy dog, and wondering what in the world her surgeon husband is up to when he says he's at work. And she's not exactly thrilled with her new lot in life; I believe the word "ennui" was created with Eleanor Flood in mind.

Much like Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette, Today Will Be Different is riotously funny, with plenty of jabs at the upper crust. While it's not quite as tight plot-wise, it's still an excellent book, one worth picking up when you need a good laugh. Also, a shout out to the illustrator of Eleanor's 12-page mini-memoir, which is included in the book. The art is awesome!

Guardians of the Louvre

Guardians of the Louvre by Jiro Taniguchi, 136 pages.
The protaganist, a Japanese artist who is visiting Paris after attending a Comic convention in Barcelona, falls ill. His fever dreams may be carrying over into his visit to the Louvre several days later, or he could be meeting the secretive guardians, and meeting long-dead artists. It's hard for him to be sure. The art is beautiful and the story is interesting.

Those Who Leave and those Who Stay: Book Three of the Neapolitan Novels / Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein, 418 p.

The story of the two friends continues, with a shift in focus as Elena (Lenu), the one who leaves, gets a university education in Pisa, marries a professor and settles in Florence.  Along the way she publishes a novel highlighting some of the episodes of sexual violence referred to in the earlier novels.  The novel, in a changing Italy now willing to grapple with these issues, is a wild success, changing Elena's life forever.

Meanwhile Lila, the one who stays, (stays in Naples, stays in the working class, etc.) leaves her husband Stefano and sets up a more peaceful household with her small son and Enzo, a childhood friend of both of the women.

The focus in this novel is on Elena and her struggles as a young mother and emerging artist, and it drags a bit as a result.  Lila is the magnetic, strange, self-destructive heart of the story, and I found I couldn't wait to get back to her story.  Happily, the fourth and final novel delivers plenty of Lila, as the two women's lives become deeply enmeshed once again.

Bitterroot

Bitterroot by James Lee Burke, 334 pages


Billy Bob Holland is a former Texas Ranger (lawman, not baseball player), a lawyer, and has a bit of an itchy trigger finger. When he travels up to Missoula, Montana to visit an old friend, and said old friend's daughter gets sexually assaulted, he embarks on a quest for vengeance, mixing it up with all of the bad seeds in Missoula (and there do seem to be a lot of them, at least in Burke's fictional version of the easy-going college town).

I'll be completely honest: the only reason I read this book is because I grew up in the Montana valley that shares a name with this book. The characters are two-dimensional at best. The plot is pretty convoluted; a flow chart or perhaps a dramatis personae or a timeline would have helped IMMENSELY. And perhaps I'm being nitpicky, but I couldn't pin down what time of year this happened (snow AND wildflowers AND forest fires? Montana may be a magical place, but those don't all happen at the same time), nor could I gauge any sort of passage of time. Kinda wish I'd put this down before I opened it.

Stalingrad

Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor, 493 pages.
Beevor does an excellent job telling the story of the German Army Group South, particularly General Paulus's Sixth Army, during the 1942-1943 campaign. Beevor uses newly opened archives, letters, and interviews to tell the story of a battle that cost hundreds of thousands of lives of soldiers and civilians and changed not only the course of the war, but also, according to the author, changed the dynamic at the Tehran conference and set the stage for the Soviet's post war ascendancy.
Stalingrad was a turning point for Hitler and for Stalin. Hitler, as he sent paper divisions in as reinforcements, and concocted impossible re-supply airdrops, was no longer to be seen as an infallible leader or a military genius, and Stalin, once his army was victorious, was able to take credit again, and claim to the infallible leader again. Stalingrad, as a place and as a battle, was a series of  stories that are horrifying on many levels, several those stories are told well here, many more are mentioned; there are fleeting scenes of cannibalism among the most wretched, there are glimpses of virtual walls of frozen corpses, and a glance at the 944 children who lived through the long battle. The city on the Volga river, and much of the surrounding area, was reduced to rubble. Observers after the siege was broken reported being unable to tell which were natural changes in the topography and which were bomb and shell craters. A fascinating book.