Echo, by Pam Munoz Ryan is a wonderful story about the lives of three young people who face enormous odds and come out triumphant. The book is found in the Juvenile section of the library but it is inspiring even for adults. Beautifully told it is a story that echoes through time and across continents.
First is the story of Friedrich Schmidt, who as a young boy growing up in the Black Forest of Germany is faced with the uncertainties of living through the Holocaust. Friedrich is an amazingly
talented musician with a birthmark on his face. Interestingly, Ryan, the author, uses this deformity to show the intolerance of Hitler and the ability to convince the German people to follow his ideas against even this young child, instead of the usual plight of the Jews. He is given a harmonica that he plays with uncommon aptitude. The harmonica gives him inner strength to face the world around him.
Next we meet two young brothers in Philadelphia, PA who have been sent to an orphanage after the death of their last living relative. They also have exceptional musical talent and with a lucky twist of fate end up adopted by a wealthy woman who is grieving the loss of her own family. With a harmonica that he finds in a music store Mike Flannery echoes the beautiful music necessary to save both himself and his brother.
Lastly, we learn about the life of Ivy Maria Lopez, the young daughter in a family of migrant traveling farmers. They move from town to town in Southern California following the work. Ivy gets a harmonica that gives her the inner conviction she needs to feel strong and secure to walk into a new school situation, make friends and keep her family together. In this story we explore the role of the tenant farmer and the exportation of the Japanese landowners to internment camps during World War II in California. The prejudice against people that are just not understood. We also see how Ivy and her parents and neighbors survive the feeling of the unknown suspense of having a son off fighting the the European theater, with either the Army or the Marines.
Munoz Ryan weaves together a story with so many lessons and such a clear picture of what each of her three main characters are feeling in each situation. This is not only an amazing novel but young people reading it will learn quite a lot of history from children their own age. They will easily be able to relate to each well developed main character.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Friday, January 22, 2016
Where Memories Lie
I accidentally stepped into the middle of this mystery series when I read Where Memories Lie for a book discussion group. Wow, what a well written mystery novel. Deborah Crombie has written a well developed story line with realistic and complicated characters living real lives. The mystery itself is involved, and not easily solved while reading the story. Each turn of the page turns a corner and changes the dynamics of the case, introducing new material that makes the reader rethink the direction of the mystery.
Crombie also writes so well that though the series obviously develops the relationships of the main players and fleshes out characters as time progresses this book was so good that it could be read and enjoyed all on its own. The reader never really feels like he has missed an important piece oHer great writing technique makes it easy enjoy on its own but also makes the reader curious to step into the world of Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid and get to know them more.
Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid's relationship have grown over the course of the series and now live together with their two sons. They are working in different divisions of the police force, but for this case come together and share information. They each have a partner, who Gemma actually tries to match up at a dinner party. Also Gemma and Kincaid each have personal problems they have to deal with, making the characters more vulnerable and easier to connect with. They have similar everyday problems that the reader can relate to. Gemma's mother is in the hospital in this book and she has issues relating to her father and sister. There is also of course the parenting problems of holding down a full time job and balancing child care and parenting time.
For this murder case, an old friend of Gemma's calls and is looking for information about a brooch that is up for auction. When Gemma starts asking questions about the piece of jewelry people start dying. As we read about the case at hand, we also are reading interspersed of an old case that has gone cold. As the plot progresses of course these two intertwined story lines start to intersect and make more sense. By the end you have quite a number of characters to remember and quite a few divergent stories coming together.
There is a map of the area at the beginning of the book, so you can follow the characters as they
traipse around following clues and sharing information. It is interesting that for the most part they can walk everywhere they need to go. Ahh... life in the city. This is a captivating mystery story and this reader plans to go back and start at the beginning and read through all 16 novels in the series and then read Deborah Crombie's newest book coming out in 2016. Quite a prolific writer!
Crombie also writes so well that though the series obviously develops the relationships of the main players and fleshes out characters as time progresses this book was so good that it could be read and enjoyed all on its own. The reader never really feels like he has missed an important piece oHer great writing technique makes it easy enjoy on its own but also makes the reader curious to step into the world of Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid and get to know them more.
Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid's relationship have grown over the course of the series and now live together with their two sons. They are working in different divisions of the police force, but for this case come together and share information. They each have a partner, who Gemma actually tries to match up at a dinner party. Also Gemma and Kincaid each have personal problems they have to deal with, making the characters more vulnerable and easier to connect with. They have similar everyday problems that the reader can relate to. Gemma's mother is in the hospital in this book and she has issues relating to her father and sister. There is also of course the parenting problems of holding down a full time job and balancing child care and parenting time.
For this murder case, an old friend of Gemma's calls and is looking for information about a brooch that is up for auction. When Gemma starts asking questions about the piece of jewelry people start dying. As we read about the case at hand, we also are reading interspersed of an old case that has gone cold. As the plot progresses of course these two intertwined story lines start to intersect and make more sense. By the end you have quite a number of characters to remember and quite a few divergent stories coming together.
There is a map of the area at the beginning of the book, so you can follow the characters as they
traipse around following clues and sharing information. It is interesting that for the most part they can walk everywhere they need to go. Ahh... life in the city. This is a captivating mystery story and this reader plans to go back and start at the beginning and read through all 16 novels in the series and then read Deborah Crombie's newest book coming out in 2016. Quite a prolific writer!
Thursday, January 14, 2016
Innocence
Innocence is an autobiographical mystery story based on the life of the author, Heda Margolius Kovaly. Even before the reader is captured by the fictional characters who work at the Horizon movie theatre, the introduction to the book captivates you with Ivan Margolious' biographical information about his mother. The author herself has a fascinating life story that is explained in this introduction and pulls the reader in even before getting to the actual mystery novel.
Written originally in the 1980s this story was written under pseudonym, Helena Novakova, which is also the main character's name in the novel. Published in 1985 under the "return to stricter living conditions in Czechoslovakia", Kovaly did not want to create any problems for her friends living in Prague. It wasn't until 2013, after Heda's death, that Innocence was republished with her name rightfully on the cover. Heda Kovaly lived through the Holocaust, having grown up in Prague, she along with her husband and parents were first gathered in the Lodz ghetto by the Nazis and then transported to Auschwitz. Both she and her husband, Rudolf were able to exist in the camps and eventually separately escape and help the resistance movement. After the war she and Rudolf became committed to the Communist Party for a better life in Prague where they were reunited in 1945. In January 1952 Rudolf was arrested and accused unjustly of "anti-state conspiracy" and as a defendant in the Slansky Trial, where innocent men were tried for fabricated offenses of spying and sabotage, he was executed in December 1952. Heda remarried in 1955 and followed her second husband, Paval Kovaly to the United States. She wrote her memoir, Under A Cruel Star, in 1973.
Innocence is the story of Helena whose husband Karel has recently been arrested for suspicion of espionage against the government. Helena gets a job in a local cinema as an usher. There we meet
Marie, Ladinka, and Mrs. Kourimska, among many other characters they interact with.
Helena is only looking to fill her time and wait till her husband will be released from prison. She is confident that his innocence will be confirmed and he will be back home soon. When the story opens with the murder of a young boy whose body is found in the theatre, an investigation begins. The vague details of the case start to reveal the female ushers private lives. As the convoluted facets of their lives are brought to light we see how the ushers lives are entangled and each is hiding a dark secret.
Though it is a fabulous mystery story just on its own merits, knowing that in a way you are reading an almost biographical account of life in the Czech Republic during the post war era, makes this novel seem that much more chilling. This mystery recreates for the reader the stifling atmosphere of political and personal oppression of the early days of Communist Czechoslovakia.
Written originally in the 1980s this story was written under pseudonym, Helena Novakova, which is also the main character's name in the novel. Published in 1985 under the "return to stricter living conditions in Czechoslovakia", Kovaly did not want to create any problems for her friends living in Prague. It wasn't until 2013, after Heda's death, that Innocence was republished with her name rightfully on the cover. Heda Kovaly lived through the Holocaust, having grown up in Prague, she along with her husband and parents were first gathered in the Lodz ghetto by the Nazis and then transported to Auschwitz. Both she and her husband, Rudolf were able to exist in the camps and eventually separately escape and help the resistance movement. After the war she and Rudolf became committed to the Communist Party for a better life in Prague where they were reunited in 1945. In January 1952 Rudolf was arrested and accused unjustly of "anti-state conspiracy" and as a defendant in the Slansky Trial, where innocent men were tried for fabricated offenses of spying and sabotage, he was executed in December 1952. Heda remarried in 1955 and followed her second husband, Paval Kovaly to the United States. She wrote her memoir, Under A Cruel Star, in 1973.
Innocence is the story of Helena whose husband Karel has recently been arrested for suspicion of espionage against the government. Helena gets a job in a local cinema as an usher. There we meet
Marie, Ladinka, and Mrs. Kourimska, among many other characters they interact with.
Helena is only looking to fill her time and wait till her husband will be released from prison. She is confident that his innocence will be confirmed and he will be back home soon. When the story opens with the murder of a young boy whose body is found in the theatre, an investigation begins. The vague details of the case start to reveal the female ushers private lives. As the convoluted facets of their lives are brought to light we see how the ushers lives are entangled and each is hiding a dark secret.
Though it is a fabulous mystery story just on its own merits, knowing that in a way you are reading an almost biographical account of life in the Czech Republic during the post war era, makes this novel seem that much more chilling. This mystery recreates for the reader the stifling atmosphere of political and personal oppression of the early days of Communist Czechoslovakia.
Monday, January 11, 2016
The Double Life of Liliane
On the back of the book under the picture of Liliane or is that really a picture of Lily Tuck as a child, is written the words, "A Novel". It is found on the Fiction shelf of the library. This could be one of the most confusing fiction stories you will read this year. An autobiographical fiction account of author, Lily Tuck's childhood, it is hard to know where real life ends and fiction begins.
This is the story of Liliane, whose double life she says begins when she boards an airplane to visit her father in Rome. There are many descriptions of a double life in this novel. There is the double life of Jews who are escaping the Nazis. Liliane's father, Rudy, Jewish by birth, is imprisoned in a detention camp when the Nazis take over France, and then later fights with the French Foreign Legion. Irene, his young abandoned wife and Liliane's mother, takes ten month old Liliane and the 19 year old nanny and drives to Portugal, then boards the SS Exeter in Lisbon and sails to America, landing of course in New York. There is the double life ,later after the war, of reconnecting with her father, who now is estranged from Irene and as a young teen travels between her father, Rudy, visiting him in Rome, where he eventually settles down, and her mother in New York with her second husband, Gaby.
There is also the double life of fact and fiction, which here is very hard to discern. The book reads like a biography, fairly dry without delving deeply into any one characters mind. In the end you are not emotionally attached to any of the characters, feeling like you only have scratched the surface of their persona. This story is totally based on factual evidence. There are the news stories of the time, the locations and people who were really apart of Lily Tuck's biography. Then there are the family pictures included as real family members, as would be apart of a autobiography. So blurred is the line between fact and fiction that at the end of the book, Liliane takes a writing class at Harvard with Professor Paul de Man, who mentions in a lecture, "...Marcel Proust, saying that in A la recherche du temps perdu, (In Search of Lost Time) which is meant to be autobiographical, it is impossible to tell what is fact and what is fiction."
Though her family goes through many traumatic momentous experiences during her formative years Liliane keeps the narration of this novel on such an even keel as to feel monotone. As a typical teenager, bored with her life, angry at the world and resentful of her parents, Liliane relates her privilged life of ballet and international travel between her divorced parents to bulimia and her college boyfriend Mark with the red MG convertible as an unemotional deconstruction of her life.
This is the story of Liliane, whose double life she says begins when she boards an airplane to visit her father in Rome. There are many descriptions of a double life in this novel. There is the double life of Jews who are escaping the Nazis. Liliane's father, Rudy, Jewish by birth, is imprisoned in a detention camp when the Nazis take over France, and then later fights with the French Foreign Legion. Irene, his young abandoned wife and Liliane's mother, takes ten month old Liliane and the 19 year old nanny and drives to Portugal, then boards the SS Exeter in Lisbon and sails to America, landing of course in New York. There is the double life ,later after the war, of reconnecting with her father, who now is estranged from Irene and as a young teen travels between her father, Rudy, visiting him in Rome, where he eventually settles down, and her mother in New York with her second husband, Gaby.
There is also the double life of fact and fiction, which here is very hard to discern. The book reads like a biography, fairly dry without delving deeply into any one characters mind. In the end you are not emotionally attached to any of the characters, feeling like you only have scratched the surface of their persona. This story is totally based on factual evidence. There are the news stories of the time, the locations and people who were really apart of Lily Tuck's biography. Then there are the family pictures included as real family members, as would be apart of a autobiography. So blurred is the line between fact and fiction that at the end of the book, Liliane takes a writing class at Harvard with Professor Paul de Man, who mentions in a lecture, "...Marcel Proust, saying that in A la recherche du temps perdu, (In Search of Lost Time) which is meant to be autobiographical, it is impossible to tell what is fact and what is fiction."
Though her family goes through many traumatic momentous experiences during her formative years Liliane keeps the narration of this novel on such an even keel as to feel monotone. As a typical teenager, bored with her life, angry at the world and resentful of her parents, Liliane relates her privilged life of ballet and international travel between her divorced parents to bulimia and her college boyfriend Mark with the red MG convertible as an unemotional deconstruction of her life.
Sunday, January 10, 2016
Girl Waits With Gun
What a fabulous story. Maybe it is because the novel is based on a true crime that happened in New Jersey, my home state. But more possibly it is just that Amy Stewart has done a terrific job presenting the story with enough suspenseful build up and just the right amount of tender caring developing the characters that the reader does not want to stop reading until the bad guy is behind bars and the justice is served.
It is November 1914 and the latest headline in the Philadelphia Sun reads, "Oh, for a Chance to Shoot at Nasty Prowlers". This article and others ran in papers across New Jersey, including my local paper growing up, the Bergen County Evening Record, which in a similar format continues to run today in 2016. Author Amy Stewart takes the simple facts of the case of the Kopp sisters vs. Henry Kaufman and creates a well developed story that fleshes out the major players in the case and adds fictional people and places to build a story that could really have happened in Bergen County NJ at that time in history. Stewart uses the silk mill industry of NJ to create a sinister character in Henry Kaufman, who has run the horse and buggy with the Kopp sisters driving off the road with his new motor car. The reader can use their imagination to be there on the streets of Paterson and along the country dirt roads out to Wycoff and see the three young ladies living on a farm staying out of society and being harassed by the likes of Henry Kaufman and his rough gangster-like friends. Though the sisters are living on the outskirts of Wycoff , hiding an old family secret, this interaction with Kaufman creates some drama and excitement in their lives which thrills the youngest sister, Fleurette.
When Constance Kopp decides that she will not take any harassment sitting down, she joins forces with the local police chief to catch the gangsters in the act of bribery and to find a young factory worker's abducted child. This is a colorful story, narrated by the eldest sister Constance, who finds her calling as a sleuth and champion of the weak. Using salacious and sensational newspaper headlines from the time period, Stewart creates a very believable storyline to fit the title, from the Philadelphia Sun, "Girl, Armed, Waits for Black Handers on Street Corner", November 23, 1914.
It is November 1914 and the latest headline in the Philadelphia Sun reads, "Oh, for a Chance to Shoot at Nasty Prowlers". This article and others ran in papers across New Jersey, including my local paper growing up, the Bergen County Evening Record, which in a similar format continues to run today in 2016. Author Amy Stewart takes the simple facts of the case of the Kopp sisters vs. Henry Kaufman and creates a well developed story that fleshes out the major players in the case and adds fictional people and places to build a story that could really have happened in Bergen County NJ at that time in history. Stewart uses the silk mill industry of NJ to create a sinister character in Henry Kaufman, who has run the horse and buggy with the Kopp sisters driving off the road with his new motor car. The reader can use their imagination to be there on the streets of Paterson and along the country dirt roads out to Wycoff and see the three young ladies living on a farm staying out of society and being harassed by the likes of Henry Kaufman and his rough gangster-like friends. Though the sisters are living on the outskirts of Wycoff , hiding an old family secret, this interaction with Kaufman creates some drama and excitement in their lives which thrills the youngest sister, Fleurette.
When Constance Kopp decides that she will not take any harassment sitting down, she joins forces with the local police chief to catch the gangsters in the act of bribery and to find a young factory worker's abducted child. This is a colorful story, narrated by the eldest sister Constance, who finds her calling as a sleuth and champion of the weak. Using salacious and sensational newspaper headlines from the time period, Stewart creates a very believable storyline to fit the title, from the Philadelphia Sun, "Girl, Armed, Waits for Black Handers on Street Corner", November 23, 1914.
Tuesday, January 5, 2016
The Last Flight of Poxl West
The Last Flight of Poxl West by Daniel Torday is presented as a story within a story. We meet Poxl West, now an elderly man who has found the family he never had in the children of his closest friend. He becomes the favored Uncle Poxl to young Eli Goldstein, a fifteen year old, who looks to Poxl as the epitome of a Jewish war hero. His bravery makes him an idol for his teenage nephew, who spends time listening to stories of how he spent the war years flying in the cockpit of a Lancaster bomber. Eli Goldstein and Poxl West explore museums and concerts always ending up at Cabots for ice cream as Eli listens to episodes that will be chapters of the book West is writing. At last Poxl's book is being published.
Eli and his parents are there as Poxl reads from his book, "And when he finally gave us what we wanted - and that audience wanted so much from Poxl West, the first Jew so many of us had heard of who had not only survived the Nazi threat but had combated it, literally - ..."
As the memoir, Skylock is published, Eli throws himself into reading the book multiple times and studying all things Poxl. He is obsessed with Poxl and all he stands for. The story alternates between Eli looking back at his life in 1986 as he goes to Hebrew School and interacts with his Rabbi and attends high school writing his history paper about Poxl and World War II. Eli reflects on how Poxl West influenced and had a hold on his life. The story within the story is that as a reader we are also reading Skylock, the memoir of Poxl West as he leaves his parents behind in Leitmeritz, Czechoslovakia, at first spending time in Rotterdam, Holland and then working in London for the rest of the war. It is the story of his growing up as a Jewish young adult during the war years, his loves, his losses and his awakening as an adult.
Torday goes into wonderful detail about everything from the experience of living through the Blitz in London to the details of all the aircraft that Poxl flies during his flight school and during the bombing raids. Using actual historical events such as the July, 1943 bombing of Hamburg, Germany known as Operation Gomorrah, Torday brings the story to life describing the feeling of being in the plane, "I felt the lightening of our plane as our bomb load went down and we went up and below us was the obfuscating cloud of dense smoke." He also describes in elaborate detail the experience of being in the bombings in London, as Poxl and his friends are working as rescue aid and nurses to help people as their homes are destroyed. Torday makes the reader feel as if you are there with air raid sirens going off around you as you head for the shelters. Also the emotional toll these events take on people and how they cope or escape.
Through it all Poxl has lost so many relationships due to the war. He is plagued with feelings of guilt and thoughts of having run away from relationships never to see the people and make amends. He has left his mother in a fit of passion not realizing that he will never see her again. He has left women behind when he does not know how to negotiate the relationship not realizing he may never see them again. As the war continues and his anger builds he needs to seek revenge on the enemy that is taking away the people in his life. "What was there to drop on? Bombs atop of bombs? I thought of my mother, I thought of my father, and of Francoise, and though I chose not to speak, I might have said, 'Bomb until there is nothing left to bomb'".
A powerful story of the war and the relationships that were created and affected by what people experienced during that time. Each of the relationships in this novel are beautifully fleshed out with all the tenderness of human interaction and all the human flaws of life.
Eli and his parents are there as Poxl reads from his book, "And when he finally gave us what we wanted - and that audience wanted so much from Poxl West, the first Jew so many of us had heard of who had not only survived the Nazi threat but had combated it, literally - ..."
As the memoir, Skylock is published, Eli throws himself into reading the book multiple times and studying all things Poxl. He is obsessed with Poxl and all he stands for. The story alternates between Eli looking back at his life in 1986 as he goes to Hebrew School and interacts with his Rabbi and attends high school writing his history paper about Poxl and World War II. Eli reflects on how Poxl West influenced and had a hold on his life. The story within the story is that as a reader we are also reading Skylock, the memoir of Poxl West as he leaves his parents behind in Leitmeritz, Czechoslovakia, at first spending time in Rotterdam, Holland and then working in London for the rest of the war. It is the story of his growing up as a Jewish young adult during the war years, his loves, his losses and his awakening as an adult.
Torday goes into wonderful detail about everything from the experience of living through the Blitz in London to the details of all the aircraft that Poxl flies during his flight school and during the bombing raids. Using actual historical events such as the July, 1943 bombing of Hamburg, Germany known as Operation Gomorrah, Torday brings the story to life describing the feeling of being in the plane, "I felt the lightening of our plane as our bomb load went down and we went up and below us was the obfuscating cloud of dense smoke." He also describes in elaborate detail the experience of being in the bombings in London, as Poxl and his friends are working as rescue aid and nurses to help people as their homes are destroyed. Torday makes the reader feel as if you are there with air raid sirens going off around you as you head for the shelters. Also the emotional toll these events take on people and how they cope or escape.
Through it all Poxl has lost so many relationships due to the war. He is plagued with feelings of guilt and thoughts of having run away from relationships never to see the people and make amends. He has left his mother in a fit of passion not realizing that he will never see her again. He has left women behind when he does not know how to negotiate the relationship not realizing he may never see them again. As the war continues and his anger builds he needs to seek revenge on the enemy that is taking away the people in his life. "What was there to drop on? Bombs atop of bombs? I thought of my mother, I thought of my father, and of Francoise, and though I chose not to speak, I might have said, 'Bomb until there is nothing left to bomb'".
A powerful story of the war and the relationships that were created and affected by what people experienced during that time. Each of the relationships in this novel are beautifully fleshed out with all the tenderness of human interaction and all the human flaws of life.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)