Staff Review: H Is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald

H Is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald is one intense book: grief-intensive, nature-intensive, language-intensive, and raptor-intensive, just for starters. Its genesis was the unexpected death of the author's father, a vibrant newspaper photographer with whom MacDonald shared a close and sympathetic relationship all her life. Indeed he sounds like an exceptional dad. MacDonald learned to love nature right by his side and accompanied him on expeditions, such as his personal project to photograph every bridge over the River Thames. Receiving news one day of his sudden death by heart attack, MacDonald is devastated. She doesn't recover for months.

For at that point in her life, she feels she has nothing: no partner, no kids, no permanent job, no house.  She's winding up a fellowship and will soon be jobless and homeless (in the less urgent sense of the latter term). MacDonald is no ordinary woman though: she is a writer, poet, naturalist, historian, research scholar, and falconer, falconry having been a mad passion since childhood.

In an attempt to deal with her overwhelming grief, MacDonald acquires a hawk -- and not just any hawk, but a goshawk, notoriously the most difficult and murderous of raptors -- and raises Mabel the Hawk to be her wild companion. Her narrative of their time together is interspersed with memories of her father and with a biographical sketch of the writer T. H. White, a tortured man, avid falconer, and author of The Once and Future King, a series of books about King Arthur. H Is for Hawk moves back and forth between MacDonald's life and White's, the two linked by their love of hawks and their hope for healing through their birds. The extensive White passages may wear on some readers.

The story of MacDonald's training of Mabel is compelling; the author becomes almost feral herself in her attempt to drown her grief in the hawk's wildness. MacDonald's writing is dazzling: unbelievable, really, the freshest, most original I've encountered in ages. Reading the book you feel the author has never met a cliché, never witnessed anything through any eyes but her own.

H Is for Hawk won the Costa Book Award for 2014 (formerly known as the Whitbread Prize, with a £30,000 purse) and the Samuel Johnson Prize (worth  £20,000) for nonfiction. The awards are well-deserved but the author's intensity began to wear on me just a bit by the end, as did the murderous intent of Mabel, whose blood-lust the author often seemed to share.

For MacDonald's a rare poet-scholar, one who doesn't have a problem snaking her hands down the rabbit hole Mabel's legs have penetrated, grabbing the frantic rabbit ensnared by sharp talons, and snapping its neck. It's a merciful act, but I found myself appalled that MacDonald could do it. Her intensity has created a rare book though, even if by its final pages I was ready to head my own less-intense way.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman

Ouch! This book hurts. It’s also dazzlingly beautiful, but the more you succumb to the beauty of the prose and of the remote island setting where the story unfolds, the more the plot rips your heart out. At least this was my experience.

But let me back up. The Light Between Oceans is a 2012 debut novel by Australian author M. L. Stedman. Many people read it; most loved it (approximately 156,000 reviews on GoodReads at last count). Then, DreamWorks acquired the film rights and a movie was made, starring Michael Fassbender and Rachel Weisz among others. The movie’s set for release in 2016. I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle the story again.

The main characters are Tom Sherbourn, a stalwart and upstanding but emotionally ravaged young World War I vet, and his free-spirited, newlywed wife, Isabel, who set up house (or lighthouse, to be precise) on isolated Janus Rock off the west coast of Australia, where Tom has signed on as light-keeper.

The book’s opening chapters are idyllic. Janus is the perfect place for these starry-eyed lovers to hole up and for Tom to heal. They both love the sea, the solitude, the silence. Some of the novel’s most gorgeous passages capture the fluctuating water, altering sky, and shifting light. But Isabel yearns for a baby. Over several years she suffers two miscarriages and an agonizing stillbirth.

Then one day a small boat washes up on the island’s remote side, carrying a dead body and a tiny living infant. Tom’s position requires that he record and report every happening on Janus Rock, but, very reluctantly, he allows Isabel to persuade him that the infant is now likely an orphan and might just be a gift bestowed by the universe after all the heartbreak they’ve suffered in their attempts to make a child. So, Tom buries the dead man and sets the boat adrift while Isabel begins caring for the infant, who instantly wins their hearts and completes their family.

The chapters that follow continue the idyll: Tom, Isabel, and Baby Lucy compose a near-perfect happy family who thrive in their exquisite life on Janus Rock. Only Tom suffers pangs of conscience -- over what he has allowed to take place, what he has omitted from his reports, an omission that could end his light-keeping career and lead to formal charges. And indeed Tom’s misgivings bear fruit. The idyll ends and the pain begins.

The moral of the story (and this is quite courageous on the author’s part) seems to be that we inhabit a moral universe, the truth will out, and wrong acts will have their full repercussions. Stedman unfolds the rippling consequences of the Sherbourns’ wrong act in a slow and meticulous way that is absolutely wrenching for the reader, who watches in horror as the family on Janus Rock is slowly ripped asunder. Sure, justice is ultimately served – and I’m 100% for justice – but in this instance I’m afraid I was rooting for the wrong: for Tom, Isabel, and stolen Baby Lucy in their island paradise rimmed by dolphins and whales.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

After hearing so many glowing reviews of the 2012 novel Beautiful Ruins from library patrons and friends and reading rave reviews in the media ("a literary miracle,” says NPR; a “masterpiece,” says Salon, “superb,” “brilliant,” “near-perfect,” “genius,” and so on), I decided I’d better check it out for myself.

And while I didn’t completely incandesce as I read the book, I’m really glad I read or, rather, listened to it. The audio version is so well-done; it was Audible.com’s Best Audiobook of 2012. Performed by Edoardo Ballerini, whose Italian and English are flawless, the audiobook navigates its way through all sorts of accents and a multiplicity of characters of all ages in such a fluid way it’s transporting.

Hmmmm, how to summarize the plot? Jess Walter worked on this book for years and years and completed other novels during its construction. His architectural diligence shows: Beautiful Ruins is a marvel of literary engineering, with a whole lot of story threads running through multiple locations over 50 years, intersecting and interweaving and resolving in such a way that not a thread is dropped. When you reach the final page, the tapestry is complete.

In a nutshell though, the book opens in 1962 on a part of the Italian coast known as the Cinque Terre (click and prepare to gasp). A lovely young actress named Dee Moray disembarks from a boat and enters the life of young innkeeper Pasquale Tursi. Dee has been performing in the scandal-plagued, filming-fiasco Cleopatra, which stars that boozily-tumultuous couple Liz Taylor and Richard Burton.

She has also been ill-treated in a shocking way by the film’s fictional producer, Michael Deane, a hilarious Hollywood grotesque whose decades of facelifts and skin-plumps leave him, at age 72, with “the face of a 9-year-old Filipino girl.” (The book is laugh-out-loud funny in parts.) Pregnant by way of an on-set affair with an actor, Dee has been hoodwinked by a corrupt movie-set doctor. Told she has cancer, she's sent away from the set to have her "growth" removed. The moment she arrives at his inn (the inn's less-than-optimal location within this coastal paradise wins it the name Hotel Adequate View), Pasquale is smitten.

From there we spin from the Cinque Terre to Hollywood, Seattle, London, Edinburgh, Idaho, and Rome -- as well as back and forth through five decades -- to trace the furiously-flawed lives of a host of intersecting characters, one of whom is the future son of our lovely actress. (The father’s name I will not reveal.)

My only minor quibble with the book (and this does not seem to have been an issue for many others) is that I did not equally enjoy all parts of it. Some story-lines are funnier and more absorbing than others, but Beautiful Ruins is gorgeously-written and shines the funniest -- and most unflattering -- light on Hollywood and the twisted minds within its glittering hills who make its crassest films (and its increasingly unsavory reality shows – more of the Duggar family or Honey Boo Boo, anyone?).  The novel is also tender and poignant, intelligent and imaginative, and, best of all, strikingly original. I’ve never read anything quite like it.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar

First, a pop-quiz question: Who or what was the Bloomsbury Group?

Answer: The Bloomsbury Group was a collection of early twentieth-century artists, writers, and other intellectuals who lived crazy, artsy, unconventional lives in the then-unfashionable (and shockingly bohemian!) London neighborhood of Bloomsbury. The most famous Bloomsbury members were the writers Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, along with the influential economist John Maynard Keynes, but the group’s core included seven others.

Priya Parmar’s novel Vanessa and Her Sister recreates the Bloomsbury Group’s world and, wow, does she do a bang-up job of it. The New York Times Book Review called her novel "an uncanny achievement" and it is. Presented entirely in fictionalized letters, telegrams, and journal entries composed by multiple characters, Vanessa and Her Sister doesn’t hit a false note. It’s truly a remarkable accomplishment.

The compelling focus of the story, which takes place between 1905 and 1912, is Virginia Woolf’s relationship with her sister Vanessa, a talented painter. Both women are in their twenties as the novel opens and living with their bright Cambridge-educated brothers in a free-form household that attracts the best and brightest to its co-ed “at-homes”: literary salons, art evenings, and dinner parties, where drinks flow, conversations shock, and no one staggers home before daylight.

Vanessa is the family’s rudder and she is forced to navigate turbulent waters, for Virginia -- beautiful, brilliant, mesmerizing Virginia, who strikes me as something of a spoiled brat -- is apt to go raving mad at any moment and has already spent time in an asylum. (Famously, 35 years later, the oft-published and successful Virginia Woolf will load her pockets with rocks and walk into the River Ouse for good.) Trying to maintain Virginia’s equilibrium takes up a good portion of Vanessa’s days.

Household waters grow more turbulent still when Clive Bell, an art critic and Bloomsbury Group member, sets his sights on Vanessa and resolves to make her his wife (in an open-marriage, of course). Virginia cannot handle it – she cannot abide anyone appropriating the attention of Vanessa, her lifeline (and, some might say, enabler). In an unhinged reaction to her own rabid jealousy, Virginia promptly attempts to win Clive for herself.

The plot is definitely something of a potboiler, but it’s based on fact and it plays out in a fairly civilized way. The Bloomsbury Group did live at a perpetual simmer and conducted themselves in the most unorthodox and incestuous ways: affairs and adulteries abounded, partners were swapped, sexual preference was rarely static, jealousies and intrigues were the order of the day, yet through the years the group remained largely intact. They were a brilliant, lively, and dynamic bunch, though a tad too gossipy, as Parmar illustrates, for my tastes.

They also traveled a lot (money doesn’t seem to be a big consideration for many of them) and the novel follows its characters all over Europe and farther afield. It’s a delight to read and even better to listen to, for the audiobook is narrated by a cast of great British actors whose faces you’d recognize right away from PBS’s Masterpiece Theater and Mystery. With their fine acting talent and oh-so-elegant accents, they do a superb job of bringing the Bloomsbury Group and this fine novel to life.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Everything I Never Told You, a 2014 novel that has garnered a long list of highly favorable reviews, awards, and other accolades, delivers a punch in its very first line: “Lydia is dead.” Lydia is Lydia Lee, the favored middle child of a mixed-race couple. Her father, James, a college professor, is American born of Asian descent, and her mother, Marilyn, a wannabe doctor who wound up a housewife, is white. Both parents dote on teenaged Lydia while also burdening her with the relentless expectation that she will fulfill all their own unmet dreams and needs.  Marilyn intends for Lydia to become a doctor, while James wants her to be popular and pretty.

The book opens with Lydia’s disappearance and subsequent discovery at the bottom of a lake near her Ohio home. Upon this tragic foundation, Celeste Ng builds an intricate structure of aftermath and backstory, deftly weaving characters and events spanning twenty years, from the 1950s to the 1970s, into a tight and increasingly oppressive and dysfunctional framework. The story's perspective shifts among family members in alternating chapters.

The big question, of course, is “What happened!!??” How did their beloved daughter drown? Was it foul play? Suicide? Some horrible accident?  We don’t find out until the end of the book. The author lays a trail of hints, clues, and suspects, one possible culprit being the wild and unsupervised son of a local divorcee, who was among the last to see Lydia alive.

Ng’s writing is fine and evocative, the societal circumstances she describes timely and fresh: the bigotry faced by Asians in America in the latter half of the twentieth century. We are now so accustomed to thinking of academic excellence, the surging Chinese economy, and the distinctly Asian flavor to our more multicultural cities, that it surprised me to realize that even educated, professional, American-born Chinese faced terrible discrimination (exacerbated in part by the Vietnam War) in so recent a past.

Ng excels at crafting sentences and at building (and resolving) an intricate plot. It is in the family dynamics she creates that I found my credulity stretched. Why is Lydia so favored, yet her older brother, Nath, an ardently-aspiring astronomer, elicits only rage or indifference from his parents? How can any parents consistently ignore a child, as the Lees do their youngest, Hannah? How could Marilyn abandon her family for months, not even leaving a note, in an early, aborted attempt to complete her education?  Is it the parents’ favoritism that causes the siblings to turn on each other?

These questions pile up and as they did, I found myself liking the Lees less and less -- every one of them -- and unlikeable characters make for a less compelling story. The more I read the novel, the more I wanted to flee its characters. But, reading through the reviews, it appears my reaction constitutes a minority view. Read the book for yourself and see what you think!

 ~ Ann, Adult Services