Category Archives: Fiction

11.11.14
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ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE-WORTHY OF NYT BEST SELLER STATUS

Anthony Doerr’s novel All The Light We Cannot See is worthy of its New York Times Best Seller status.  This wonderfully written book , like The Book Thief, tells a story unfolding during World War II, primarily through the eyes of children.

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Set in France and Germany, a blind girl raised by her locksmith father is brought into the middle of a search for a fabulous  jewel. The jewel is removed from the museum where her father works to keep it from the occupying Germans. Meanwhile a young German boy growing up in an orphanage with his sister is co-opted by Hitler Youth because of his demonstrated skills in working with radio receivers.

Lives intersect during the search for the missing jewel and for the location of a hidden French Resistance radio transmitter, located where else but in the attic of the young girls uncle’s home in Brittany where she has fled from the German occupation of Paris.

Doerr’s organization of the novel is pleasing to the reader.  The chapter construction  splendidly carries the story line filled with suspense, intrigue,  the realities of war and wonderfully portrays the love between a father and daughter. The book moves very quickly but the reader never feels pushed or rushed.

I highly recommend All The Light We Cannot See, a very good read  for teenagers and adults. I would predict that it will be among the best novels of  2014.  Anthony Doerr  is the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector and the memoir Four Seasons In Rome.  

10.27.14
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SAVAGELY BEAUTIFUL….NO! SAVAGELY BRUTAL YES! THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH

The dust cover of Richard Flanagan’s new novel The NARROW ROAD to the  DEEP NORTH, describes the book as a ” Savagely beautiful novel.”  I think not, but who am I to disagree with the rave reviews from the New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, The Sunday Times ( London) and a long list of other prestigious  publications.

imgresThe novel wraps itself around the story of prisoners in a World War II Japanese POW Camp being brutalized in forced slave labor  to construct  the infamous Thai-Burma Death Railway.  Flanagan’s protagonist is an Australian physician , whose assignment is to make every effort to keep the prisoners alive only so that they can be returned to depravity cutting an impossible railroad bed through the Burmese jungle.

Readers who absorbed the brutality in the Japanese POW camps in the non-fiction books Unbroken  by Laura Hillenbrand or Fly Boys by James Bradley  I think will have had quite enough, without slogging through the excessive deprivation and savagery in Flanagan’s novel.  Surely, there is a parallel story here, an adulterous love affair between the protagonist and his uncle’s wife  frustrated by his supposed devotion to his wife despite a lifetime of promiscuity.  For me, this narrative did not connect or remotely rise above the books excessively redundant brutality.

Sorry, but if there is redeeming virtue in The NARROW ROAD to the DEEP NORTH, I seem to have missed the sign posts.

Richard Flanagan also wrote five additionaL highly acclaimed novels, Death of  River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould’s Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist and Wanting.  I have not read any of his aforementioned books.

 

 

10.03.14
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TRAVERSE RICHARD RUSSO’S “BRIDGE OF SIGHS “

Richard Russo’s 2007 novel Bridge of Sighs, published six years after his Pulitzer Prize winning Empire Falls, captures the rhythms of small town life in Russo’s own inimitable style. In Bridge of Sighs Russo transports the reader to upstate New York where he delivers many of life’s complexities and social issues through a wide cast of characters whose lives are interconnected through intricate webs of relationships.

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The menu of contemporary issues is complete: Racism, mental illness, bullying, teenage sex, tyrannical fathers, loyalty without love, love without loyalty, divorce, reconciliation, industrial pollution, Cancer, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters.

From this churning pot of small town contradictions emerges in Venice , a world renown artist, made famous by placing on canvas  mental images of the provincial place of his boyhood. A local legend says that lovers will be granted eternal love and bliss if they kiss on a gondolagat sunset under Venice’s Bridge of Sighs. Will unrequited love appear?  Without question a good read from a great American novelist.

Also by Richard Russo: Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, The Whore’s Child

08.12.14
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MARK GREANEY- SUPPORT AND DEFEND=THE TOM CLANCY TRADITION CONTINUES!

Support and Defend is the first Tom Clancy novel written exclusively by Mark Greaney  following  Clancy’ s  death in October of  last year.z

imagesIn this new book, Greaney captures  present day fears by building a tale around the theft of top-secret CIA files by an underling within the department. Shades of Edward Snowdon’s exploits are ever-present as Dominic Caruso , a familiar hero to all Clancy fans, embarks on a personal mission to retrieve access  codes to the data before  CIA  human assets throughout the world are compromised. Dominic  is  the primary character throughout this adventure with The Campus  playing only a supporting role. The President and son are missing from this adventure.

Support and Defend is fast paced and straight forward in its plot development as compared to other Clancy books.  However, Greaney puts a surprising human face upon ” Transportation Director” Adara Sherman! Not always ,” all business!”

Mark Greaney is carrying on the Tom Clancy tradition. A daunting task!

08.03.14
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The Smoke at Dawn/ General Bragg’s Waterloo At Chattanooga

President Lincoln’s brilliant decision to elevate Ulysses  S. Grant to General in Chief of the Union Army following Grant’s victory at Vicksburg on July 3, 1863 was further justified by the success of Grants first assignment following his promotion in the battle of Chattanooga, Tennessee.

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Jeff Shaara in his new historical novel The Smoke at Dawn , the third in his Civil War Trilogy, places Grant in the Cumberland following the Confederate defeat of General Rosecrans by Braxton Bragg at the Battle of Chickamauga Creek. Grant immediately demoted Rosecrans and replaces him with General George Thomas and brings in Sherman’ s army for support. The Union army has been under siege in Chattanooga and Grant orders the siege broken at whatever the cost. Bragg, sinking in his own bombast and his repeated failure to lead , is on the verge of converting a great Confederate victory into a bitter defeat. As Sherman rides to the rescue  of General Thomas and the Union Army, he makes a rare mistake by misreading the geography, giving Bragg one last chance of grasping victory from the jaws of defeat.

There is plenty of drama as Shaara tells the story of this epic battle with the versatile vehicle of historical fiction that , following in his fathers footsteps , is his trademark. Shaara is the son of Pulitzer Prize winning Michael Shaara, author of The Killer Angles.

The two previous novels in the trilogy are A Blaze of Glory , the battle Shiloh and A Chain of Thunder, the Siege of Vicksburg.  Search gordonsgoodreads.com reads for other Jeff Shaara historical novels based upon the Revolutionary War, Civil War and World War II.

05.29.14
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THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON-SUNSET ON THE WESTERN FRONTIER

Larry McMurtry’s new novel The Last Kind Words Saloon  takes the reader on an imagery ride into the sunset of the Old Wild West that he pictured so vividly in his previous classic Lonesome Dove.  Don’t look for a traditional story line in this latest McMurtry offering. Rather, this is what I call a chapter book ,which moves very quickly through images of the fading  lives  and lifestyles of  some of the Old West’s  iconic figures.

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Through short , crisp chapters,  the reader glimpses  days and nights with Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday,  and Jessie Earp the keeper of The Last Kind Words Saloon.   You will be re-acquainted with  Charlie Goodnight, the one-time Texas Ranger turned cattleman that was prominent in McMurtry’s fabulous novel Comanche Moon.  The trail passes through McMurtry’s home Texas turf from Long Grass  to Mobetie, then on to Tombstone, Arizona and of course the O.K. Corral. Men in search of  a last frontier.

The Last Kind Words Saloon  is  a last watering hole, a lost way of life, a friend fading with age as the Old West disappears before the eyes of the very men who established the treasured folklore.  With hope , they journey with a  faded marquee, The Last Kind Words Saloon, seeking to find a new place, which time has now forever lost.

Search Gordonsgoodreads.com for other great McMurtry books including  Lonesome Dove, Comanche Moon,  Dead Man’s Walk, Streets of Laredo and The Last Picture Show. 

 

 

04.19.14
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THE GOLDFINCH-ALLEGORY TAKES WING

Since completing The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt the novel has won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Forgive me , but I had speculated that to myself prior to the announcement, after reading only a hundred pages.

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The plot is indeed complicated and the characters surrounding Theo Decker’s evolution into young adulthood evolve in pyramids of detail that can at times be overwhelming. However, Tartt never leaves any doubt as why each player in her cast influences  life choices made by the protagonist.

Park Avenue, Las Vegas, Lower East Side, Amsterdam. The societal character of these destinations is ingrained in the story. Tartt’s research and attention to subtile nuance is extraordinary. Tartt will immerse even the knowledgable New Yorker in the sounds, sights, energy and social theatrics of the city. Her descriptions remind one of  a Pete Hamill character in a smoke-filled  Daily News City Room banging on an Underwood under a green eye shade lamp at 1 AM , amid a torrential rainstorm roaring  against window panes!

Theo’s mother is killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and there begins the connection with The Goldfinch a 17th Century painting by a Dutch Master that is worth millions. Of course, it was his mother’s favorite work of art and remains both symbolically and physically the centerpiece  and road map of the novel.

Theo’s life after his mother’s death could have been traditional Park Avenue, thanks to loving parents of a classmate. Even after Theo’s alcoholic father appears with his latest love , Xandra , and whisks him off to Las Vegas , the caring Barbour’s do not disappear. Each of Tartt’s characters stay in the mainstream until the very end, including Hobie the master of antique restoration and Theo’s only rock.

Without revealing the story, this book will take you to the worlds of drugs, antiquities, New York Society , the art world underground and dozens of subtile stops including a decaying Las Vegas subdivision offering no hope to residents of foreclosed abandoned homes. The landscape of this novel is immense and the attention to intricate detail ( Peal and Co.) and antique restoration is of the calibre of a well researched treatise on the subject. Yet, it all comes together with meaning and purpose, but not without expecting much time, thought and introspection on the readers part. The use of the editors marker was sparse.

From Theo, late in the journey. ” Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart than can’t be trusted–? What if the heart , for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civil responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly held common virtues and instead toward a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? ” Get the picture? Theo traversed all of the aforementioned territory and lived to tell the tale.

Other books by Donna Tartt: The Secret History and The Little Friend.

 

03.11.14
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ORPHAN TRAIN-FORGOTTEN CHILDREN-NOW ALIVE!

Between 1854 and 1929 orphaned and homeless children cast out from the teeming tenements to the harsh streets of New York City were collected and boarded on special railroad trains headed  for the  farmlands of the American West. The hope of the organizers was finding families to offer these nine to 13 year olds a home and new beginning.

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NOTICE OF ARRIVING TRAIN !

HOMES WANTED FOR CHILDREN.  A COMPANY OF ORPHAN CHILDREN OF DIFFERENT AGES WILL ARRIVE AT OAKLAND, IOWA, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9, 1904. THE DISTRIBUTION WILL TAKE PLACE AT 10:30 AM AND 1:30 PM.

Over a period of sixty years a quarter million indigent immigrant children were sent West. From station to station in small towns west of Chicago they were  paraded by poorly equipped social workers before prospective foster parents, many of whose motives were less than noble.  Few if any background checks of the perspective families were completed. Children were selected at each stop and those that were not chosen moved on to the next whistle-stop somewhere down the line. There was little or no follow-up and many of these children became little more than un-paid household labor and farm help, often in dysfunctional families.  Many were not given the opportunity to attend school.

” THE CHILD YOU SELECT IS YOURS FOR FREE, ON A 90 DAY TRIAL, AT WHICH POINT IF YOU SO CHOOSE, YOU MAY SEND HIM  BACK.”

Christina Baker Kline in her riveting New York Times best selling  novel Orphan Train (2013)  weaves a story of  how the toxic ingredients of the Orphan Trains, conceived to rescue children from the depravity of New York’s streets, often cast them into  even worse circumstances. Orphan Train is the story of  one train rider, a  9 year-old girl, who finally in her 90s  comes to reveal her secret story to yet another rider from a turbulent world of another era.

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“NOBODY WANTS ME. I HAVE TO GET BACK ON THE TRAIN.”  “ALL RIGHT CHILDREN THE JOURNEY CONTINUES, THE GOOD PEOPLE OF ALBANS, MINNESOTA ARE WAITING.”

The story is powerful and Orphan Train is a rewarding read, both historically and emotionally.  Christina Baker, in remarkable fashion, creates a protagonist who vividly portrays this little known chapter in American history.

Earlier this year I referred you to Jacob Riis’s  How The Other Half Lives  @ gordonsgoodreads.com.  Riss was among the first Muckrakers , uncovering social injustice in America. It is in his How The Other Half Lives that I first learned the history of the Orphan Trains.

Orphan Train is a novel so well researched that it could be categorized a historical novel. Kline was able to interview four actual train riders when they were in their late 90s.    Other works of fiction by Christina Baker Kline  are Sweet Water, Desire Lines, The way Life Should Be and Bird in Hand.

03.03.14
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THE LAST PICTURE SHOW-COMING OF AGE-OSCAR WEEK

It seems coincidental to be posting Larry McMurtry’s semi-autobiographical  novel The Last Picture Show on the morning after the Oscars. The 1961 book became the screen play for the 1971 motion picture adaptation starring Cybill Shepherd, Jeff Bridges, Cloris Leachman and Timothy Bottoms as Sonny ( presumably Larry McMurtry).  The picture won two Academy Awards with a total of eight nominations and was followed by a sequel based on McMurtry’s  novel Texasville. McMurtry grew up in West Texas  thus becoming the natural setting for The Last Picture Show.  Surely the book is McMurtry’s coming of age in a everybody knows everybody small town with little to do and less to offer.

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” Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town. There was only one car parked on the courthouse square-the night watchman’s old white Nash. A cold norther was singing in off the plains, swirling long ribbons of dust down Main Street, the only street in Thalia with businesses on it. Sonny’s pick up was a 41 Chevrolet, not at its best on cold mornings. In front of the picture show it coughed out and had to be choked for a while but then it stared again and jerked its way to the red light, blowing out spumes  of  white exhaust that the wind whipped way.”

Enter the cast of characters, buddies, girl friends, oil field rough necks , the pool hall king, the football coach and his unfulfilled wife, Roberta ( Mrs. Popper). “When Sonny kissed Mrs. Popper outside the Legion Hall it seemed to him that the whole spectrum of delicious experience lay suddenly within his grasp.” And so goes this marvelous adventure of growing up i the 1950s in what could be a hundred other American small towns.  McMurtry’s brilliance nails nearly every nuance  of teens stumbling into adulthood.

It is fitting that we post The Last Picture Show during Oscar week. McMurtry is the author of some 40 screenplays including Lonesome Dove  and he co-authored the screen play for Brokeback Mountain. He has also written thirty highly acclaimed novels including Lonesome Dove for which he won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  The book was the basis of the TV series and the blockbuster motion picture of the same name.  Search goordonsgoodreads.com for overviews of McMurtry’s other great series of books on the American West.

02.03.14
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DARK FIRE—C.J.SANSOM-TUDOR ENGLAND

Dark Fire is the second  of the Matthew Shardlake Mystery Series written by the acclaimed historical fiction novelist C.J. Sansom.  If one is looking for a painless way to enjoy the history of Tudor England ( Henry VIII)  read all of this wonderful Sansom series which begins with Dissolution and currently ends with Heartstone.

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The search for the secret of Dark Fire, desperately sought by Thomas Cromwell on behalf of Henry VIII ,leads  lawyer Shardlake through the perils of  multiple murders and further intrigue.  Anne Boleyn has already been beheaded and  Anne of Cleves, the fourth wife of Henry , is about to be dethroned in favor of  Catherine Howard.  Amidst the turmoil of the king’s wives, Cromwell seeks to protect his own position by providing the monarchy with the formula for Dark-Fire, an ancient form of flame thrower, which in its day, in warfare,  was akin to a modern-day nuclear missile.  He turns to Shardlake to unravel the mystery and find this weapon for the king.

As is usual with Sansom, there is a parallel plot, this time involving  Shardlake trying to keep a young woman falsely accused of murder from death by torture, of course in the Tower of London.

Dark Fire is a highly recommended  gordonsgoodread!  If you are new to Sansom pick up his work and read them in the following order: Dissolution, Dark Fire, Sovereign, Revelation and Heartstone.  Overviews of these Sansom books can be searched at gordonsgoodreads.com.

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Finish these and you will be a well-informed conversationalist regarding Tudor England.The  Sansom novels present history and humanity folded together in perfect form.