“I think I first realized something was wrong when our next-door neighbor, oom Piet Oberholzer, was murdered. I must have been about six then.”

Is this not a just-right opening sentence for a memoir of Rhodesia on the cusp of its war for independence, as seen through the eyes of a British boy who was born in a tiny town near the border with Mozambique?

If your shelf of “Memoirs of Childhood in Colonial British Africa” is sparse, and you’re looking for something to sidle alongside Twenty Chickens, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, and Doris Lessing’s Under My Skin, then this is the book for you. There’s a caveat, though—the first half and the last half of the book are so radically different from each other that they might as well have been published separately. I had to skim (skimming ever faster and faster) the tediously uninteresting second half.

Mukiwa is divided into three parts: Book One (the first 200 pages) covers the author’s childhood from the mid 1960s until the late 1970s; Books Two and Three (the remaining 200 pages) cover his adult years, first fighting in the war and then returning from England in the 1980s as a journalist to revisit the land of his youth. Again (see Twenty Chickens), an African-childhood memoir attempts to do too much over too many years.  Book One on its own would have earned between 3 and 4 stars, but instead Mukiwa earns just 2 stars because the fighting years are just unbearably boring.

But—perhaps you have a shelf of “Wars, Fighting, and Battles,” and that shelf is sparse (though I can’t imagine how it possibly could be, given the serious and ongoing glut of this category). In that case, you’ll probably skim the first half, revel in the war half, then shelve the book accordingly.

Memoir enthusiasts usually expect that social/familial relationships will be delineated (and we at The Book Shark have been critical in the past of memoirs that do not do so satisfactorily), but I appreciate Book One of Mukiwa as a memoir of a boy’s relationship with a particular place, rather than with people. His family members are almost entirely absent; two sisters are mentioned but are of so little relevance that when one of them is suddenly referenced halfway through the book as the reason that the author could dance well (“My sister Jain had taught me well, jiving with me on the verandah at home to her Beatles and Sonny and Cher records”) I was floored, thinking “Wow, they talked sometimes? And danced together?!”  [1]

But I accept this memoir as being about the author’s relationship with Africa—the land itself—and at this he very much succeeds: I felt his love for Rhodesia, I was there with him on childhood hikes in the Chimanimani mountains on the Mozambique border, and I could cry over the fact that walking there now is impossible because of the landmines that were buried during the war:

Up here I felt like the last human being on earth. The range was sixty miles long and thirty wide, and there were no roads or human habitation anywhere within it. Rock dassies scurried between the boulders, and in the distance a baboon sentinel marked a low mastiff bark to warn his troop of my approach. His bark hung in the air, echoing between the outcrops… Way below the timber forests rolled away into the hazy blue distance, punctuated here and there by tea and coffee plantations. I got up and strode on up the trail, higher and higher.

Soon the terrain opened out on to a steep slope covered with a fine sandy loam, beach white, from which rose cedar and yellowwood trees. Their branches were draped with vines, and delicate orchids clung to them too. Klipspringers, disturbed at their grazing, bounced away from me in dainty bounds. Then another barrier of granite and I was above the tree line. Only ferns, the odd protea and aloe survived up here. It was a strange vista, called the Mountains of the Moon, a barren landscape dotted with craggy rock formations, whipped by a cool wind, the southeast monsoon that swept unhindered across the flood plains of Mozambique before coming up abruptly against the formidable 8,000-foot barrier of the Chimanimanis…

…the commanders decided to turn the Chimanimanis into a lethal barrier by seeding them with anti-personnel mines. The whole range was transformed into a vast minefield. In the valleys below, in the fortified homesteads on the timber estates and the coffee plantations, they would hear loud booms rolling down from the mountains from time to time. Not thunder, but explosions, as klipspringers, baboons, sable, eland, and blue duiker set of mines and blew themselves to pieces. And for almost ten years humans never ventured there at all.

This passage (which is longer than what I’ve excerpted here and includes a dramatic walk during a thunder and lightning storm) is almost worth the price of the book. I cannot stop thinking about the tragedy of the landmines and wishing I could go back in time to walk there as the author experienced it before the war.

My only other complaint is about the plethora of distracting comma splices—there’s one every five pages or so! This is unacceptably bad editing. (“Few could afford cars, I encountered just the odd jalopy held together by wire and optimism.”)

[1] This lack of interest in social relationships does lead to some annoying confusions here and there. Albert and Violet, for example, suddenly appear to sit near the fire with the author to look over a Wanted notice, “gathered round with their sleeping babies.”  The author is six so doesn’t read well, so he gives the Wanted flier to Violet, “who was the best reader among us. With some difficulty and the occasional stumble, she began to read it aloud by the flicker of the boiler fire.”  Hmmm…Albert and Violet haven’t been mentioned yet, but clearly, from context, they must be either siblings or playmates. Puzzling over the clues, I conclude the following: Violet doesn’t read well, so she’s around the author’s age…the sleeping babies are of course dolls…Albert plays with dolls too so he is probably younger than Peter, perhaps 3 or 4.

Can you imagine my exasperation upon finding out later that Violet and Albert were native illiterate adults who were married to each other, and the sleeping babies were their actual living offspring?

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

Reviewed by Donna
I happened to read this book immediately following The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, although they were published two years apart. They are interestingly similar: both are psychological suspense, both are told from the point of view of middle schoolers, and both are creepy as hell in similar ways.

Mr. Hibma is a geography teacher who doesn’t “teach the subject of geography.” He lectures about whatever randomly strikes his fancy, and leaves “the memorizing of topographical terms and state capitals to the kids. They had books. They had exercise manuals. If they were smart and curious they’d end up knowing a lot, and if they were dumb they wouldn’t.”  I really loved this teacher and empathized with his severe case of cynicism over the state of public education these days.

The writing in this book is excellent. The pacing, too, is perfect: only gradually do we realize that the middle-school boy is not mentally healthy; he is quite depraved. Mr. Hibma, too, is equally (or more so?) depraved, but for a long time we are unclear about how seriously to take him. His fantasies of murder are made clear in the opening pages of the book (see the excerpt, below), but the reader doesn’t know if this is the sort of harmless fantasy we all have at one time or another, or if Mr. Hibma is actually serious.

The reason for three stars instead of four or five is the ending: a neat and tidy Hollywood ending that doesn’t ring true to who these characters actually are.

One last thing. I hated the trim size of this book. It’s oversized and weird. Why couldn’t it be normal book size?

*                    *                    *

Reviewed by Cindy
The point of view taken by the previous reviewer is tragically, catastrophically narrow. I have been compelled to write a second review in order that potential Citrus County readers are not driven away by Donna’s characterization of the novel as a well-written, but essentially one-dimensional murder mystery with a “Hollywood ending.”

EXCERPT
Citrus County was a couple hours north of St Petersburg, on what people called the Nature Coast, which Mr. Hibma had gathered was a title of default; there was nature because there were no beaches and no amusement parks and no hotels and no money. There were rednecks and manatees and sinkholes. There were insects, not gentle crickets but creatures with stingers and pincers and scorn in their hearts. There was the smell of vegetation, every plant blooming outrageously or rotting by the minute. There was a swampy lake and a complex of aging villas surrounding that lake, and one of these villas was now Mr. Hibma’s home.

Teaching had been the only job available to him, and for a while it was amusing, another lark, but now he’d been doing it a year and a half. It was February. It was Thursday. It was fourth period. Mr. Hibma was sick of skinny, smelly, hormone-dazed kids staring at him and lying to him and asking him questions. He was sick of their clothes, their faces. And the teachers were worse. Mr. Hibma did his best to keep to himself—ate in his classroom, avoided heading clubs or committees, kept all his discipline in-house instead of dealing with the office, and kept away from “7th hour,” which was what the younger teachers called meeting at a Mexican restaurant Friday afternoon and getting drunk.

The teacher in the next room, Mrs. Conner, was not young and had likely never been drunk. She was about fifty, a grammar Nazi with bronze-colored hair who wore sandals that were too small and caused her toes to spill out onto the floor. She was an English teacher who refused to assign any literature that was morally corrupt. Poe was morally corrupt. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson was morally corrupt. Probably the Russians. Certainly the French. Mrs. Conner often informed Mr. Hibma that his shirt was wrinkled. She asked him pointed questions about his lesson plans, about all the games the kids played in his class. She and her husband, a retired cop or fireman or something, owned a ministorage place. Mrs. Conner’s classroom was decorated with posters about life not being a destination but a journey, posters of kittens hanging from ropes, posters of a ship or a whale with one word displayed across the top, like Persistence. Mr. Hibma often fantasized about murdering this woman. This was her last year of teaching before she retired and lived snidely off her pension and her husband’s pension and their ministorage profits, rising at dawn to greet her open days, getting more heavily involved in her church. The idea of letting her smirk through the last day of her twenty-fifth year as a teacher, loping around in her undersized sandals feeling as if everything she’d ever done was right, of letting her go home and sit on her porch on that warm June evening with her tea, and then, just as she dozed off, sneaking up behind her and….  The idea sustained Mr. Hibma.

Rating: ★★★★★ 

Easily the best book I’ve read in the last fourteen months. It has everything: Russian fairy tales, pioneer homesteaders, a lost child, a red fox, Alaskan wilderness, an orphan, and lots of snow and ice. The snow and ice here is written in such a descriptive way I feel as though I’ve never before read a book with so much cold in it. Now, this is certainly not true, since I’ve read plenty of Jack London, including “To Build a Fire,” but the fact that Snow Child had a colder effect on me than London’s works is strong evidence that Ivey may be the most descriptive and best writer of icy, frozen, arctic environs ever.

This book is perfection.

The story is loosely based on the legend of Russia’s Snow Maiden, specifically Arthur Ransome’s version “Little Daughter of the Snow,” which appeared in Ransome’s 1916 collection of Russian folktales, Old Peter’s Russian Tales.

(Sidenote: About seven years ago, a version of “Little Daughter of the Snow” was published in picture-book format. The story is greatly abridged, but the art is delightful and the book is a must-have for young children.)

Ivey has made this story very much her own, however, first by making the setting 1920s Alaska rather than 1800s Russia, and second by not hewing too closely to the events chronicled in the folktales. Instead, she brings in various threads of the traditional stories that complement her unique plotlines, but always leaves the reader in suspense about which of the threads will be followed and which will not. If you are familiar with Ransome’s story, fear not—the end of Snow Child is quite different, but wholly true to the Snow Maiden’s spirit.

The cover art is so appealing I had to simply hold the book for a long while before starting it. It’s whimsical and very true to the story, and at first I thought it was surely the best possible cover for the book. I have to give kudos, however, to the United Kingdom version, which was published simultaneously with ours. Their cover reminds me of an Astrid Lindgren book for young adults. It’s less childlike, less playful, more mysterious, and more feral. While our cover speaks of friendly innocence, their cover implies a certain feral wildness that perfectly captures an important facet of the Snow Child.

Excerpt:
She had imagined that in the Alaska wilderness silence would be peaceful, like snow falling at night, air filled with promise but no sound, but that was not what she found. Instead, when she swept the plank floor, the broom bristles scratched like some sharp-toothed shrew nibbling at her heart. When she washed the dishes, plates and bowls clattered as if they were breaking to pieces. The only sound not of her making was a sudden “caw, cawww” from outside. Mabel wrung dishwater from a rag and looked out the kitchen window in time to see a raven flapping its way from one leafless birch tree to another. No children chasing each other through autumn leaves, calling each other’s names. Not even a solitary child on a swing.

There had been the one. A tiny thing, born still and silent. Ten years past, but even now she found herself returning to the birth to touch Jack’s arm, stop him, reach out. She should have. She should have cupped the baby’s head in the palm of her hand and snipped a few of its tiny hairs to keep in a locket at her throat. She should have looked into its small face and known if it was a boy or a girl, and then stood beside Jack as he buried it in the Pennsylvania winter ground. She should have marked its grave. She should have allowed herself that grief.

It was a child, after all, although it looked more like a fairy changeling. Pinched face, tiny jaw, ears that came to narrow points; that much she had seen and wept over because she knew she could have loved it still.

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

Back-cover reviews describe this as “atmospheric” and a “modern fairy tale,” words that fail to convey that the last quarter of the book is actually a bona fide horror story. True, there are many enjoyable “atmospheric” elements: small-town Germany is convincingly portrayed (in fact, the setting is inspired by the actual little town of Bad Münstereifel), and the character of Herr Schiller, an elderly man who regales our middle schooler with dark, disturbing legends ostensibly from the town’s past, provides a wonderfully eerie and folktale-ish mood and is the most engrossing aspect of the book.  The end of The Vanishing, however, unexpectedly turns into Hollywood horror. I had a weird sense that I was no longer reading a book, but a screenplay for a gruesome movie in the Wes Craven genre, à la The People under the Stairs. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; I just felt that the book inexplicably changed tone somewhere toward the end, which took me aback.

A minor flaw is the voice of the middle schooler. She doesn’t come quite fully alive, and her relationship with her guy friend feels slightly off.

The death of her grandmother in the first few opening pages is also very odd. As another reviewer pointed out, nobody would “explode” from putting on too much hairspray near an open flame; that premise is ludicrously farfetched. Since the scene sets the stage for the book and is meant to explain something about the girl’s treatment by the other students at her school, the reader is left confused: are we to accept the death at face value? Or is it meant to mirror the mythical folktales told by Herr Schiller? If we aren’t meant to take it seriously, then the girl’s ostracism doesn’t make sense. Then again, why would an exploding grandmother necessitate ostracism? None of this really adds up.

Still, I’ve given the book three stars for its folktale-imbued sense of life in small-town Germany. I recommend it if you have a particular interest in Bad Münstereifel, and/or serial killers with unusual ideas about what to do with dead bodies.

The Invisible Mountain, by Carolina De Robertis. Vintage Books (2009), 424 pages.

This is a book that will make you want to fly to Uruguay and walk the streets of the first village you come to, knocking on doors and asking if you might come in to listen to stories told by whoever might be living there.

Uruguay as portrayed here is magical, beautiful, and filled with people whose childhoods and family histories are enormously captivating.  Part of this atmosphere is conveyed through the use of a splash of magical realism in the first third of the book—though if you’re not a fan of magical realism, please be assured that there’s not too much of it to be annoyingly confusing, nor does it distract from the main plot in any way. There’s just the right amount, and it’s skillfully employed: the author gradually stops using it until, by the middle of the book, it’s gone. The book progresses in time from 1900 to 1960, and the use of magical realism to inform only the first few decades of the century felt perfectly appropriate to me because it mirrors the way in which family ancestral stories far removed from our memories can take on certain magical qualities, while the more recent past feels more mundane.

The last third of the book deals with historically accurate Uruguayan political events, and though I was less intrigued by some of these characters, I appreciated learning about the Tupamaros and the events of the late ’60s and early ’70s.

Excerpt:
She didn’t have the answer to his question. It might have taken much longer if it hadn’t been for the second homecoming. Years afterward, as a grey-haired woman trying to understand her granddaughter Salomé, holding her thin hand on a rattling bus after fifteen years of fearing for her life, Pajarita would think back to this year, 1930, the year of homecomings, and decide that there must have been a magnet, some cosmic unseen magnet that attracted—instead of pots and nails—the men she loved back home, just as Salomé was coming home now, like some miraculous, emaciated changeling. Such things do happen; all kinds of ore lies buried inside lives, and surely people can’t see all the forces that push them, draw them, hold them up. Sometimes you call the forces forward yourself, without knowing that you’ve done so. In the year of homecomings, in 1930, two weeks before Ignazio came home, Pajarita had knelt before a ceramic statue of San Antonio and prayed on Coco’s behalf….

Late one night, a knock sounded at the door. Ignazio had been home a month, and they sat in the living room, listening to the winter rains.
“Are you expecting anyone?”
She shook her head. More knocking.
Ignazio stood, looking wary. “Who is it?”
“Pajarita?”
The voice pushed at her, made her rise and grasp the knob and turn and pull and there he was. Artigas. Drenched  and shivering under a too-small umbrella. Overgrown hair clung to his head. He held hands with a little girl, about five years old, a mulata with Artigas’ hazel eyes. She was also wet. She stared up at Pajarita.
Artigas said, “Are you going to let us in?”
She motioned for them to enter. Her brother dripped onto the rug. She could taste the verdant plains of Tacuarembó, the hot dry wind, the smell of stew from the cooking pit, the crack of firewood under Artigas’ ax, his smell, his voice, his shadow in the dark.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

One day this summer, however, wandering about in my local independent bookstore, I ran across a stack of The Family Fang surrounded by little notes of acclaim written by the booksellers who work there. The words “breath-taking,” “stunning,” and “genius” were being thrown around (this time, however, without any mention of “wackiness”) so, with a heavy sigh and a heart burdened by my sense of responsibility to Book Shark readers, I forced myself to pick it up and look inside. Within a few pages it became clear to me that the family Wilson had created was surreal, bizarre, possibly even psychotic, but not, fortunately, charmingly eccentric.

While the distance between eccentric/kooky/wacky and bizarre/surreal may seem like an insignificantly short one to many, it is, I feel, a distinction that is crucial. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, for example, is full of bizarre characters and goings-on that are difficult for readers to relate to but are rendered in a way that makes all the madness seem somehow entirely believable. This is the case with much Southern gothic literary fiction. Genre fiction set in the South, on the other hand, is frequently populated by entire towns full of  nothing but “wacky, kooky” personalities whose eccentricities are meant to make them appear original and therefore believable, but who in fact, by virtue of being nothing but a collection of these traits, come across as entirely unbelievable.

So. For those of you who care which category the Fang family falls into, rest assured that I have carefully assessed the nature of their strangeness and have concluded that theirs is come by honestly, that they are in fact, legitimately bizarre.

The family consists of parents Caleb and Camille, and their children, Annie and Buster. Caleb and Camille are performance artists who create “happenings” which they film for later viewings in art galleries. Their events are meant to disturb the public (who are always unknowing participants in these pieces) but, in fact, end up disturbing their children (who are always a part of the “art” as well) to a far greater degree. We come to understand the depth of Annie and Buster’s despair with this way of life through chapters alternating between various performances in their childhood and their current lives as adults.

Wilson’s family is original and I appreciate the twisted sensibility that appears throughout the novel—the subject matter of Camille’s paintings for example—but I am left with the feeling that he doesn’t quite know how to move his story from a strange and fascinating image, to a plot that actually takes the reader somewhere. Wilson seems to be aware of this himself as his description of Buster’s novel mirrors exactly the way Wilson seems to be stuck:

The novel seemed to be a cave of sorts, twisting, maze-like passages, but Buster focused only on finding an exit that was not the original entrance, pushing his way through the dark until he found a path that held the promise of escape. He knew that Micah and Rachel would emerge, finally, from the pit and take their places aboveground, but he had to get there, had to find the correct sequence of events that would unlock that image.

Unfortunately Wilson does not discover the right sequence of events for the Fang family’s exit and what began with such promise, ends in a flat, completely unbelievable ending—an ending so incompatible with what went before, in fact, that I couldn’t even remember it. You may recall that I read this book over the summer (three months ago): when I sat down to finally write about it and could not remember how it ended, I went back to re-read it and was surprised to find the ending was meant to shock me. The fact that I was not only not shocked, but couldn’t even remember it confirms my feeling that it was completely wrong. A great ending, no matter how unforeseen, should have a sense of inevitability about it—a feeling that even though you, the reader, would never have thought of it, the story could not have ended any other way. This is not the case with The Family Fang however, and as a result I have (sadly) downgraded it from what I thought was going to be at least a four star novel, to a mere two.

EXCERPT:
Two hours into a nap that he had taken for no reason other than he was bored, Buster was shaken into consciousness, his muscles aching from the effort of staying asleep for so long, by his sister. “I found something weird,” she told him. “How weird?” Buster asked, unconvinced that it warranted getting out of bed. Annie held up a tiny oil painting, the size of a dental dam, which featured a small child with his arm, up to his elbow, inside the mouth of a wolf. Around them were gleaming surgical instruments, flecked with blood. It was unclear whether the child was placing the items inside the wolf or pulling them out. “There’s like, I don’t know, a hundred of these paintings in the back of my closet,” Annie told him. At the prospect of overwhelming weirdness, not simply an isolated case, Buster found his interest wax. “Okay, I’m up,” he said, and he followed his sister into her bedroom. On their hands and knees, Buster and Annie moved the nearly one hundred paintings from the faint light of the closet to the middle of the bedroom, arranging them like tiles on the floor. When they had retrieved every last painting, they looked in stunned silence at the resulting disharmony that now filled the room.

A man, covered in mud and thin, lash-like wounds that dripped blood, wandered in a field of palaminos.

A little girl, buried alive, played jacks by match light while her parents wailed above her grave.

An ocean of dead, decomposing geese were stacked like cordwood by men in biohazard suits.

A woman, her hair on fire, held a brush made of bone and smiled an exact reproduction of the Mona Lisa’s expression.

A young boy, his hands wrapped in barbed wire, wrestled with a tiger while the boy’s classmates circled around them.

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Vindication!  I read Three Cups of Tea a couple of years ago, well before the scandal broke (via the April 17 episode of 60 Minutes), and was unable to get more than halfway through it. Not because of boredom (though there was plenty of that), nor the quality of the writing—something about the book simply pissed me off. I was angry enough to post a review of the book on this website, even though our policy is to review only books that we have completed. In my review (which I ended up removing about a year after it was posted, in order to conform to Book Shark policy), I mentioned that I found myself hating the author, as well as the cultish behavior of his followers. (I recall a friend of a friend carrying on for over a half an hour about how life-changing the book was, and how he had come to realize that his life was utterly meaningless and sad compared to Greg’s. He was clearly in the thralls of cultish Greg worship, and it freaked me out.)

Three Cups of Tea felt disingenuous to me. I could not understand his behavior following his “kidnapping.” Why were there no emotional repercussions of any sort? He simply carries on as if nothing had happened, filled with the same humanitarian urges as before, with no feelings of anger toward the “kidnappers” or any doubt whatsoever about their worthiness to receive 100 percent of his time and devotion? While ignoring his newborn baby on the other side of the planet? I kept wondering about a father who would have so little interest in getting to know his own new baby (firstborn) because the children of people who supposedly almost killed him needed his help. Actually, I wondered a great deal about his true feelings toward children, because I didn’t believe he particularly liked them. Part of what felt false as I read was this: here is a person who has made his life’s purpose helping children. That’s why he wrote the book, why he started his charity, why he was doing everything—it was all For the Children! And yet children are almost entirely absent from the book. He doesn’t talk to them, interact with them, or explain in any detail what he hoped the schools will do for them. In the few places they do appear, they are not portrayed as individuals but as a homogenous little pack of star-struck fans, completely in awe of him, pulling on his hands, leading him to and fro, and so on. Cute little monkeys—part of what makes the landscape quirky and fun, but certainly not any meaningful aspect of the book. I found this very odd indeed, and couldn’t believe he failed to relate a single conversation with a child in his book. What did the kids hope to learn? What subjects would they study? What had their schooling been like thus far? What did they have to say about a new school? I blamed the editor for not getting Greg to answer these questions, then gave up on the book in disgust.

And now I’ve just finished the exposé Three Cups of Deceit. Who better to bring Greg’s evils to light than the amazing and brilliant Jon, one of the most engaging writers on the planet, an actual mountaineer and humanitarian, and himself a victim of Greg’s, having donated about a hundred thousand dollars to the fake charity?

Deceit is a slim book at just 75 pages, but nobody researches as thoroughly and passionately as Jon, and this is a must read not only for those who read (or tried to read) Tea, but also anyone with a general interest in charlatans. The kidnapping was a lie. Schools were not built. Millions of dollars were squandered. The IRS was lied to. Everybody he ever met was lied to. And I bet I’m right that he doesn’t even like kids.

(Interesting side note for those following the fascinating new field of memoir fraud litigation. The same lawyer who filed the suit against James Frey’s publisher, on the grounds that the book was falsely advertised as nonfiction and consumers were due their money back, is now seeking restitution for Tea readers, on the same grounds. Read about it here. Shockingly, only 1,345 readers actually requested a refund for Frey’s book. Let’s all demand our money back for Greg’s fake book!)

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Broken Glass Park is a coming of age novel originally published in Germany (so I suppose I should properly refer to it as a Bildungsroman).  The coming-of-age protagonist is a seventeen-year-old Russian immigrant living in the slums of Berlin. I loved her voice, and found her to be refreshingly unpredictable. I couldn’t guess, for example, what her intentions were when—after going to the newspaper offices to complain about the tone of an article concerning her stepfather’s recent murder of her mother—she winds up contacting the senior editor at his home and inviting herself to stay with him for a few days. Nor was I sure what she was thinking when—on an impromptu date with a kid who gradually reveals himself to be an immigrant-hating, far-right member of the National Party—she pressures him to rollerblade with her toward a wooded area in a bad part of town.

This is a fast-paced and unsentimental story that reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye. I recommend it highly. Just one rather minor point, though (I almost feel petty complaining about this, but since I was forcefully pulled out of the story and had to put it down for a bit as a result, this must be said): what possessed the translator to translate “dachshund” into “weiner dog”? How could he not know that “dachshund” is, in English, “dachshund”? He turned our tough, gritty narrator into a three-year-old. She simply never would have said that. Nor would she have called her guardian “dumpling.” So this is perhaps not the finest translation of Bronsky’s work.

Excerpt:
I turn the corner and find myself in the living room. I have to shield my eyes because there’s a bright TV on. The sound is off. Christina Aguilera is dancing on the screen, her blond dreads flying around and her mouth straining. She seems distraught that she’s unable to make a sound.

Against the wall is a couch, long and oddly shaped, like a giant shrimp. There’s a mound on the couch. Shit, I think, trying to back out of the room. But the mound begins to rise. It sheds its husk—a blanket. I retreat, startled, and step on the remote. Christina Aguilera’s voice blasts through the air at full volume.

The noise is so jarring that I squat down and put my hands over my ears. My eardrums feel like they’ve just burst. And it’s still loud as hell. The mound on the couch morphs into a human shape, jumps on the floor, and pounds a button on the remote. The TV screen goes dark. I can hardly believe how immediate the silence is. I stand up again. In the dark, I can’t tell who is standing in front of me…

“You must be the…,” he says, knitting his brows.
“Sascha.”
“Right. Volker told me about you. You stayed out of sight all evening. I was wondering where you were hiding.”
“I was tired. I fell asleep.”
“Aha.”

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Joyce Carol Oates, in my experience, is a writer you either love or hate (love because of how effortlessly and incisively she maps out the terrain inside her character’s minds, or hate because of her compulsive, neurotic, nearly deranged use of the em dash, and its accompanying run-on sentences.) Both of these qualities are present in typical abundance in A Widow’s Story. I think it’s safe to say that if you love Oates, you will love this memoir, and if you find her writing style makes you want to beat your head against the wall, you will want to read it only after precautionary measures (a bicycle helmet, say) have been taken.

In this, her first memoir, Oates tells about the sudden, unexpected death of her beloved husband of forty-six years and the grief that subsequently consumed her. Oates has avoided the all-t0o-common pitfall for the grief memoirist—that of becoming so lost in one’s private pain that the writer forgets she is writing for a reader, and that this reader requires an actual story (as opposed to a self-absorbed three hundred page journal entry)—and has ended up with what I think is the best memoir about grief and loss I have ever read. Her ability to access all of her feelings, while at the same time maintaining an analytical distance from those feelings is a skill that sets her work apart from a long line of books I had high hopes for, but which ultimately failed in their efforts to bring me into their world.

A Widow’s Story is beautifully told, completely accessible, and not to be missed by either the memoir fan or the general reader.  But, as with all of Oates’ work: Read safely, wear a helmet.

EXCERPT:
Of all deliveries I have come to most dread those from Harry & David those ubiquitous entrepreneurs of fateful occasions—Sympathy Gift boxes adorned with Sympathy Ribbons hurtled in all directions across the continent. Why are people sending me these things? Do they imagine that grief will be assuaged by chocolate-covered truffles, pate de foie gras, pepperoni sausages? Do they imagine that assistants shield me from the labor of dealing with such a quantity of trash? This morning I am eager to forestall another delivery of sympathy baskets for I have dragged out all the trash cans I can find in the hope that the trash will be hauled away, I have just emptied the mailbox—so stuffed, I could barely yank out its contents—and this mail I am “sorting” by way of throwing most of it into the trash can—there arrives the UPS delivery truck—another Harry & David monstrosity?—”Mrs. Smith? Sign here, please”—crying bitter tears as I open the carton—tear open the cellophane wrapper—tear at the basket cramming into the trash can packages of chocolate-covered truffles, bags of gourmet popcorn, here is a Gourmet Riviera Pear—unnaturally large, tasteless, stately as a waxen fruit in a nineteenth-century still life—here is a jar of gourmet mustard, and here a jar of gourmet olives—whoever has sent me this, I have no idea—the card is lost—the label is lost—I am frantic to get rid of this party food—I am infuriated, disgusted, ashamed—for of course I should be grateful, I should be writing thank-you notes like a proper widow, I should not be weeping and muttering to myself in icy rain at the end of our driveway bare-headed and shivering in a rage of futility accusing my husband “You did this! —you went outside in the freezing cold, I know you did, this is exactly what you did, when I was away in Riverside you did this very thing, you were careless with your life, you threw away both our lives with your carelessness contracting a cold, a cold that became pneumonia, pneumonia that became cardiopulmonary collapse—and here as if in rebuke to my raging despair is a Harry & David Miniature Rose—a delicate little rosebush that measures about five inches in height—which I think that I will keep—though, back inside the house in better lighting, pried out of its packing-case and set on the kitchen counter, the Miniature Rose appears to be already wilting, near-dead.

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Hamilton has written a smart, funny book that stands out in the glutted chef/memoirist category in that she writes about her life—her childhood in rural New York, working on an MFA in fiction, her marriage and travels with her family to Italy—rather than just chapter after chapter about various restaurants. She does have her own restaurant in New York (Prune) but the chapters about it are mercifully brief and unlike many chef/authors, she does not focus on it in a way that sounds like one long advertisement for her restaurant.

Hamilton has a real talent for sarcasm and is at her best when ridiculing the hypocrisy and condescension of others. Her problem, however (and the reason for four stars rather than five), is that she seems to be unaware of her own tendency toward self-congratulation and smug superiority. Whether she is writing about cooking, other writers, opening a restaurant, being a mom, or even about being humble, she describes herself in terms that make it clear she is better at it than everyone else. This didn’t bother me for the first two thirds of her book—because she really is very funny and a very good writer—but there is a limit to even a smart, biting sense of humor if the author is always the most special person in the room and everyone else is an idiot.

Despite this drawback, Blood, Bones & Butter is a great read, obviously for anyone interested in an insider’s view of the restaurant life, but also for the the general memoir fan.

EXCERPT:
The reader reads aloud, with a sing-song up… then down… then down again cadence. My mood shifts from merely reluctant to derisive. It’s a tired reading style. I’m sick of it. It attaches more imortance to the words than the words themselves—as they’ve been arranged—could possibly sustain, and it gives poets and poetry a bad name….

Unbelievably, she’s reading from pages of pale green rice paper—they remind me of hundred-dollar bills—on which she has written by hand. We have computers, of course, in 1997. Her poem is not good but good-looking and well-dressed. She’s missed the point. She should be in bookbinder school. Blindfolded and spun around by her obsession with the handwritten word, the feel of paper, and the smell of ink, in this round of the game she’s pinned the tail far away from the donkey, right into the mantel. She still thinks that writing is about self-expression; I can just picture her, with a favorite callligraphy pen, sitting at her desk in front of the window where a spider plant hangs, a large table of expensive hand-wrought paper before her and a big bowl of milky sweet tea. And there in the weakening sunlight, she maps out a description of an old man’s hands—her own grandfather’s perhaps—with knuckles like like like…and ah, the metaphor comes, like pecans. Knuckles wrinkled and brown like toasted pecans.

She finishes reading and looks up at the room, smug and afraid simultaneously. We remain silent, some people’s eyes are closed though a couple of people sigh crisply, audibly, as if it say you have pierced my soul.