The Next Best Thing

Jennifer Weiner, the master of the chick lit novel has written another fun plot line.
This time her heroine is a young woman who comes to Hollywood, a naive, pure, ingenue.
Ruth Saunders was in a fatal car accident as a child.  Her parents are killed and she is physically deformed.  She is brought up by her grandmother who works hard to develop in Ruth a strong sense of positive self esteem despite scars on her face.

So this becomes the story of beauty and whether it is skin deep or who you are as a person.  This light, fluffy plot takes on the larger issue of how people treat each other.  How people react to a person when they can see a physical flaw.  Whether it is scars on your face, color of your skin or sitting in a wheelchair, it can alter your first impression of the person you are talking to.
But also in the novel the author shows how fickle Hollywood can be.  You can age out of popularity in this business, also how much you weigh and your body type are important to whether you will work or not in this industry.

Told around the story of Ruth and her vivacious grandmother, who pull up roots and move across the country so Ruth can try her hand at writing scripts for television.  Her grandmother works as an extra and meets Maurice the new man of her dreams.  "As it turned out, senior citizen like my grandmother, the ones who were both ambulatory and with-it enough to get themselves to the set, read a script, and take direction, were in great demand as extras."

So between funny episodes that tell the behind the scenes story of trying to make it big time in a competitive, back stabbing world, there are some tender moments as Ruth and her grandmother negotiate their lives together and in the world at large.

The Lost WIfe

Alyson Richman seems to be turning out novels at an amazing speed.  The Lost Wife is a wonderful story, full of historical accuracy of what life was like for Jewish families in Europe leading up to the takeover of Czechoslovakia and then in the concentration camp, Theresien.

Richman talks in an interview about overhearing a woman explaining at the hairdresser that she knew about a man and woman who found each other many years after the war, who though they were married they each thought the other spouse was dead.  Richman who had been working on the idea for a book about an artist living in Theresien camp decided to use this idea as her jumping off point.

What a beautiful story she has written.  The two elderly people meet for the first time in sixty years.
They have both lived long full lives thinking the other had died during the Holocaust. But through it all they never forgot the other.  Richman tells the story of what happened and how they reach their current circumstances with alternating chapters telling the story from each perspective.  The reader sees what happened throughout the war years and how the couple came together and how they ended up apart.

Her historical accuracy and descriptions of being in a concentration camp give the reader a way to really relate to the experiences of many people who lived through that time.  Richman intersperses real people and events that happened in Theresien to give the reader a real understanding of life in that horrific environment.

A wonderful love story and a story that shows that a feeling of strength and determination can have such a strong effect on one's life.  That people who overcame terrible odds, won against the war machine of WWII by having families and bringing new generations of children and grandchildren into the world to carry on their family names.  That brave people risked everything to let the world know what was happening in the camps.

Willful Behavior

Donna Leon has just published her 24th book in the mystery series following the police work of Commissario Guido Brunetti.  I just discovered this author and character and read completely out of order book number 11, Willful Behavior.  

This is a wonderfully written mystery story.  The characters are well developed and you can get a great idea of who they are even jumping in the middle of the series.  Leon writes such descriptive dialog and character representation that you feel like you know them even though you are meeting them for the first time.  Leon does say that the time is irrelevant in her books.  She does not really age her characters in real time.  Brunetti loves to come home and eat lunch with his family.  His wife Paola, a college professor, works in her home office and cooks gourmet meals for her family.  Their son and daughter are typical children who in this book are just there in the background to help create the loving family life that is the back drop for Brunetti at the end of the day.

This was an intriguing mystery about a young college student who is killed and as the plot unfolds, it is suspected that she has connections to lost or stolen Holocaust artwork.  We learn about the war years in Venice and how the government turned a blind eye to what was happening in Italy during the war. In this book Leon writes about the different attitudes Italians had during the war and afterwards. There is reference to resistance fighters, secrets of collaboration and the exploitation of the Italian Jews.

Leon writes with attention to detail, both in the meals Paola cooks for Brunetti and in the historical events she references throughout the novel.  She expertly offers twists and turns that leave you surprised at the end of the book, about what really happened to victims in this case.

The Collector

The Collector is a artistic mystery written by Anne-Laure Thieblemont and translated by Sophie Weiner.   Not only does the plot revolve around some ancient artwork being sold at auction and then disappearing, but the author writes in a very descriptive artistic style.

This is the story of Marion Spicer who works for an organization called Search Art with her best friend Chris.  Marion spends her days looking through auction catalogs trying to spot works of stolen or lost art for this company and its clients.   It is very apropos then when Marion finds out the father she thought had died when she was a child, was very much alive and had created a whole new persona for himself as Edmond Magni, a wealthy and well known collector of pre-Colombian art.  Now he has really died and she las been named as his sole 

Marion is left to inherit Magni's extensive collection of unique and famous sculptures if she can find three missing pieces within a time limit.  This sets her off to face danger and intrigue where some unscrupulous dealers will do anything to protect their secrets.

The Collector is a fast paced story following the mystery of the artwork and the dealers who will do whatever it takes to protect the value of their collections.  Though the characters are not well developed it is a fun novel with many twists and a surprising outcome.  This book has all the elements of a good mystery, a few deaths and a cast of dangerous characters. You will be routing for Marion Spicer all the way to the end.

The author Anne-Laure Thieblemont was an investigative reporter in art trafficking and has met many famous art collectors.  The Collector was her first mystery novel.  When Anne-Laure was not writing she was out searching for gems and designing jewelry that she had made in Istanbul.  She made her home in Marseilles.  Unfortunately she passed away suddenly in 2015.  This is sad on many levels including that there is a second book in this series, yet to be translated into English and then the series will end.  

The Rosie Project

Wow is all I can say to the wonderful world you fall into when you start reading this book.
The author, Graeme Simsion, really makes makes you feel like you are walking in Don Tillman's shoes as you follow his process to find a wife.  Tillman is a professor at a small college who, it seems clear, is not only a science geek, but has some of the exact qualities of being somewhere on the autism spectrum that he is studying and is oblivious to that fact.   As a running joke through out the novel characters keep telling each other, "Humans often fail to see what is close to them and obvious to others."

There is a wonderful cadence to the story as Don goes through the process of setting up his questionnaire based on his likes, dislikes and routines that he thinks will help him find the perfect woman to be his wife.  He sets up the Wife Project with the help of a friend.   His friend sends a young beautiful psychology student his way and he meets Rosie Jarman who is looking for her "real" father.  Rosie's mother, before her death, told her that she had sex with a man in her graduating class from medical school and Rosie was the product of that escapade.  Rosie has decided she wants to find this man and Don helps her with genetic testing, creating the Father Project.

Along the way on the their search Don and Rosie have many adventures.  Don is having the best time of his life and is willing to postpone the Wife Project while helping Rosie.  Through a series of well paced, funny hi -jinks and clever dialog, Simsion creates a moving, creative love story.

Though the ending starts to become clear early on the solid writing style and witting repartee keeps the reader engaged all the way to the end.  Romantic but not sappy this is a fun book to read.

The Mystics of Mile End

Sigal Samuel has created a beautiful love story in her first novel, The Mystics of Mile End.
Written as a coming of age story, we hear the story from four viewpoints.  First we hear the story from the point of view of a child, Lev.  The Hebrew translation of Lev is heart.  This is a story of the heart and how it can fall in love and how that love can be shattered.  After hearing the story told by Lev we hear the story through the eyes of  David, the childrens' father.  Then we hear the story retold from Lev's sister, Samara's interpretation.  This is always a terrific way to read a book, so that you are comparing the same life experience from the minds of many different characters.    In each narration new perspectives of the same facts help to flesh out the reality of the situation.  Then just when we think we have all the facts we hear the story from a fourth influential voice.  Chaim Glassman, their neighbor, Hebrew teacher and Bar/ Bat Mitzvah tutor.  From his vantage point both literally as he watches the comings and goings of the people in the neighborhood through his window, and also figuratively because he has the ear of his students.  Glassman has an influence on the young minds he helps to mold.

This is a story of Kabbalah and the mystical traditions of Judiasm intertwined with the disappointments in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the feelings of loss in a family after a death. Looking for answers to the meaning of life and the reasons for loss, Kabbalah gives the characters in this book something larger than life to strive for.  Each of the main characters in this story is searching for meaning in the hardness of everyday life.  Each of the characters in this novel are struggling with their religious beliefs.

Mr. Glassman gives Lev and Samara the explanation of Kabbalah as the ultimate source of knowledge of the Jewish religion.  Eating from the Tree of Life , Mr. Glassman explains will give
you the secret of how to live forever.   Lev asks, "The Tree of Live is one of those secrets? What does it do".  Mr. Glassman explains, "The most important one.  Centuries ago, it became a very popular kabbalistic idea.  You should  better ask, what does it not do! The Tree of Life does everything! It is what God used to create the universe out of nothing. It has ten parts—ten vessels—and when God poured His light down into them, the whole world appeared. And so our holy sages taught that a person who wants to go back up to God has only to climb this same Tree."

The story takes place in Mile End, described as the half hipster, half Jewish religious neighborhood of  Montreal Canada.  This is where Lev and Samara are growing up with their father, the college professor, David and all the flawed neighbors.  This is a sometimes humorous but always touching novel about the nature of life and the reason to exist.  It is about family relationships, how fragile and easily misunderstood they can become.  It is about silence and sound, looked at through a mathematical and scientific lens, and the need for human relationships.

The Seven Good Years: A Memoir

In his newest book of short stories and essays, The Seven Good Years: A Memoir, a title that references the Bible story of Joseph, who interprets Pharaoh's dream that there would be seven good years of plenty and then seven bad years of famine, Etgar Keret has written some of his best material. He is a prolific short story author with five other books to his name.  He writes about life in Israel, in a satirical, honest, truthful way.  His stories can seem to be complex, contradictory and sometimes ambiguous but always at the end of each story, Keret has delivered a message, though sometimes coded, his point of view.

In this book, Keret, writes about experiences that happen during the first seven years of his son, Lev's life and the last seven years of his Dad's life.  The last time he will be both a son and a father at the same time.  He talks about life as a father and how the birth of a child changes a person.  He writes about his relationship with his wife.  He also writes about everyday life in Israel.  He writes about his relationship with both his brother and his sister, who has become a strictly religious Orthodox Jew, the mother of 11 children.

In the essay titled, "Bombs Away" he gives you an idea what it is like to live in a country under fire.
He talks about a friend coming to visit who tells him that the Iranian leader wants the total destruction of Israel even at the expense of Iran itself.  His friend says why continue with life if we are going to be destroyed.  Etgar Keret explains to his wife what is the use of wasting time and money to fix up the house if we are all going to be decimated?  So they start to let everything go.  They do not do house repairs, his wife stops using the dishwasher and only washes dishes on an immediate need basis.  They stop mopping the floor and removing the garbage.  Then Keret has a dream that a peace treaty is signed with the Iranians.  "That hit her really hard.  Maybe S. was wrong", she whispered in terror.  "Maybe the Iranians won't attack.  And we'll be stuck with this filthy, rundown apartment, with debts and your students, whose papers you promised to give back in January and haven't even started to mark...."  Finally, he writes, his wife fell back to sleep but he could not.  "So I got up and swept the living room.  First thing tomorrow morning, I will call a plumber."

This is the clever and interesting way he starts a story off in one direction and then twists around to make a point he wants to bring home about the way his family experiences life as Israelis and as second generation Holocaust survivors.  He talks about his parents, his father who has recently passed away from cancer and his mother who remembers her life in World War II Poland.
He shares memories of his time spent with his father at the end of his life.  He talks about visiting Poland on book tours and purchasing a house in Warsaw, Poland to honor his mother.

He talks about bringing up a child in Israel and how everyday activities of life there are punctuated by the attacks of rockets and bombs.  How he and his wife try to keep life as normal as possible and also try to make staying safe a game, trying not to scare their son while explaining difficult everyday questions of a young child.

He writes about the feeling of writing his first story, which gives the reader insight into what he felt like being a young soldier int he Israeli army, "I wrote my first story twenty-six years ago, in one of the most heavily guarded army bases in Israel  I was nineteen then, a terrible, depressed soldier who
was counting the days to the end of his compulsory service.  I wrote the story during an especially long shift in an isolated, windowless computer room deep in the bowels of the earth.  I stood in the middle of that neon-lit freezing room and stared at the page of print.  I couldn't explain to myself why I wrote it or exactly what purpose it was supposed to serve.  The fact that I typed all those made up sentences was exciting, but also frightening.  I felt as if I had to find someone to read the story right away, and even if he didn't like it  or understand it, he could calm me down and tell me that writing it was perfectly all right, and not just another step on my road to insanity."

As the reader, you can really feel like you are there in Keret's shoes.  He writes with such passion and feeling communicating to readers outside Israel what it truly feels like to live under the pressures and uncertainty of everyday life there.  Etgar Keret brings the conflict in Middle East right into your living room, where you are sitting comfortably on the couch reading, he makes you feel just a little bit uncomfortable.