Staff Review: Red Rising Trilogy by Pierce Brown - Audio book version

What a trilogy! Wow. It is dark. It is brutal. There are shameful deeds, shocking betrayals, and blood feuds. Wars and reconciliations. Violence and tenderness. This trilogy really covers all areas of human emotion. A friend says it's a cross between Game of Thrones and Hunger Games. I think it also has a dash of Divergent and tiny drop of Harry Potter in there as well. Pierce Brown has created a fascinating world with his Red Rising trilogy.

Darrow grows up as part of a slave race, the Reds. The thing is, they don't realize they are slaves. They think they are doing the hard labor of mining underground on Mars so future generations can come and terraform Mars and create a better future. What the Reds don't know is that they have been lied to.

Tim Gerard Reynolds narrates all three of these books. Reynolds does such a good job portraying the heart of Darrow, our main character, that he seems the perfect person to read these stories. Reynolds hails from Ireland with classical theater training. His strong Irish accent gives the story depth and character and it is pleasing to listen to.

One initial caveat: Reynolds takes on a haughty voice when he narrates the characters who are Golds (the all-powerful group in Darrow's world), "I do say! My good-man!" and to be honest, this threw me right out of the first book and I did not think I could listen if he did this voice continuously. Luckily, this annoyance fades and you get used to the portrayal. The haughtiness and genteelness make sense for the characters he is portraying - the Golds are nothing if not haughty. 

As the books progress, we find Darrow fighting against a whole society of people who would have him remain a slave and will die trying to keep the status quo. Which leads me to one of the things I am most impressed by with these books. This author really knows how people manipulate others to get what they want and how the minds of warlords might plan their strategies. As I listened, I kept being amazed at the ideas and logic the author created for his characters. This first book does spend a lot of time world-building, which can be get old, but then you are thrust into this amazing world suddenly. It keeps you guessing and you don't know who Darrow should trust or who will betray him.You have to hold on tight, it's quite an adventure. 

Once you have made it through this epic trilogy, be on the lookout for Iron Gold, a new book in the Red Rising Universe, considered to be book four of the Red Rising Saga. It is set to be released in January 2018. It begins ten years after the events of book three and is a start to a new trilogy. Hopefully, Carnegie-Stout will have the audio book soon after its release. It too will be narrated by Tim Gerard Reynolds.

~Angie, Adult Services

Staff Review: Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen's not a rocker, he's a religion -- to my mind. I worship the guy and his music, having been baptized in the church of Bruce one night in Madison years ago at a concert on his Darkness tour. The evening was life-changing; I went home a believer.

That said, let me now proceed to an honest and objective review of Springsteen's 2016 memoir, Born to Run, named after his greatest album. Well, I have to say, Born to Run is a mighty fine book, which is hardly surprising because Springsteen is, above all, a storyteller and his life makes for quite a story. He's also a lyrical poet, so his words rest polished and powerful on the page.

His memoir traces the entire course of his life, focusing in particular on his troubled relationship with his father, an unhappy, hard-drinking, verbally-brutal factory worker and the model for many of the hopeless characters in Bruce's songs. Sorting this relationship has been an abiding struggle for Springsteen, especially given that he himself has been tormented by the black melancholy that so often consumed his pop. Bruce's battles with depression are probably the revelation of the book.

Front and center, however, is the music. Springsteen's life has been spent in active, if not obsessive, service to his music: his songwriting, his performing, and his fans. He's famously hardworking and exacting of his bands; no one would argue with the contention that he may be the hardest working performer ever to grace a turntable or stage. Now 68, Bruce is still putting on high-energy, high-intensity, no-breaks, nearly-four-hour shows -- and lots of them. For many readers, the memoir pages dedicated to his musical inspirations, his creative habits, and the arduous practice schedules to which he and his band adhere will be ample reward for reading the 500-page book.

But there's plenty of personal detail too. Who else but Bruce can provide the honest-to-God truth about the failure of his ill-advised and brief first marriage, his dovetail-joint of a bond with second wife Patti Scialfa, and his love for his three kids. Even when recounting the history his hardcore fans already know, Springsteen does so in such a heartfelt, humble, and often humorous way that we're happy to hear it all over again. An added bonus in these troubled times is that unlike with so many rocker bios, we're left not with an overwhelming sense of the guy's decadence and debauchery but rather his profound decency. The man's a testament to integrity.

I wish I could catch Bruce on Broadway, where he's currently doing a series of one-man shows, which include acoustic songs and readings from this book. Springsteen recently extended his Broadway run by another ten weeks after the initial run sold out in a day. Hail the Boss! May he live forever! Read this book and then catch one of his shows.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel

I was living in Maine in 2013 when the North Pond Hermit was apprehended. He was caught 29 miles from my house. His arrest was a big deal because Christopher Knight, the hermit, had subsisted in the wilds of Maine, undetected, for 27 years largely by burgling empty vacation cabins. For decades the home owners had no idea who was taking their stuff. According to Knight himself, he broke into about 40 cabins per year for 27 years for a grand total of 1,080 break-ins. He did no damage, took only what he needed to survive (food, tarps, books, etc.), and always felt remorse.

How Knight wound up in the woods -- and survived 27 Maine winters without once building a fire -- is the subject of journalist Michael Finkel's book The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit. I couldn't put the book down.

Knight grew up in Maine, the son of quiet, self-sufficient, live-off-the-land Mainers. Chris took the family's characteristic reticence to an extreme and after finishing school and quitting a dead-end job, he drove up to Moosehead Lake, abandoned his car, and began trudging south through the dense Maine woods. He eventually found a spot near North Pond (within earshot of civilization) -- a small clearing ringed by thick foliage and huge boulders -- and here he hunkered down for the next 27 years.

Knight's arrest and the incredible unfolding story of his life in the wild caught Finkel's attention, and, through sheer determination and persistence, Finkel was able to launch a correspondence with the man. He also visited Knight in jail several times, never expecting or receiving a warm welcome. His resulting book sheds as much light as can be shed on Christopher Knight.

Some reviewers have dinged the book because they find Knight to be a cipher with nothing deep or interesting to say about his strange existence or his motivations. I disagree. While the hermit is not the most likable guy in the world, I actually grew to like him. He's smart, droll, nuts about books, and eccentric, which is not such a bad thing. He often struck me as insightful and profound. Above all, I found his outdoor survival abilities astounding. He maneuvered through the woods, and in and out of area camps, for decades without being found, and he survived 27 bitter winters through a carefully-honed schedule of meticulous practices (never sleeping past 2 AM on the coldest nights, for instance, so he wouldn't succumb to hypothermia in his sleep). So, Hermit of North Pond: hero or villain? Read this riveting book and decide for yourself.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline

Christina Baker Kline, author of the runaway bestseller Orphan Train, is back with a fine new novel, A Piece of the World. The impetus for this new work was Kline's interest in painter Andrew Wyeth's relationship with a considerably older woman, a native Mainer named Anna Christina Olson. Christina, as she was known, is the subject of Wyeth's most famous painting, 1948's Christina's World, and in her new novel, Kline brings the enigmatic Christina to life.

She does a bang-up job of it too, alternating chapters that propel us through Christina's young adulthood with chapters narrating her initial introduction to Wyeth (when she is 46 and he just 22) and their ensuing friendship. At age 46, Christina's life is solitary and hard. She lives without electricity or running water and has suffered since childhood from an undiagnosed condition that eventually reduces her to crawling on her arms, dragging her legs behind her.

Crushed by a huge romantic disappointment in her youth, Christina spends the bulk of her days caring for her crumbling old farmhouse and her brother Alvaro, who works their farm. Their days are not often visited by joy. Enter the energetic and idealistic Andy Wyeth, who is artistically intrigued by the Olson house, its occupants, and the surrounding landscape. Soon he is painting there every day, which he continues to do for the next thirty years, often painting Christina and Alvaro. Not included in the book but adding to its poignancy is the fact that upon his death at age 91, the famous and wealthy Andrew Wyeth, happily married with his own large family, chose to be buried beside Christina and Alvaro in their humble family plot.

Kline paints her characters with the same magical precision Wyeth's paintings are known for. She paints the landscape uncommonly well too, vividly evoking the sometimes-harsh, always beautiful Maine coast. Most touching of all, Kline imbues the physically disabled Christina with dignity and grace, the very qualities Wyeth ascribes to the awkward woman in his paintings. Christina's life was difficult, her days filled with pain, but she enjoyed 30 years of friendship with a remarkable man and was immortalized in one of the world's most famous works of art.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

It's hard to do justice to Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad in a quick review. I was leery of reading it because I knew it was going to be emotionally wrenching -- and it was -- but it's also sublime and wonderful: beautifully written, compelling, imaginative, even fantastical in parts, yet it rings so true. Whitehead obviously did a vast amount of research for the novel, but there's not a word of dialogue that breaks the story's spell.

In the second sentence of her New York Times review of the book, Michiko Kakutani calls The Underground Railroad "a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery." That it does. 

The novel tells the story of Cora, a slave on the Georgia cotton plantation of an especially brutal man, a drunkard and a sadist. Circumstances and a fellow slave convince Cora to attempt an escape and what follows is the wild narrative of her long journey to freedom, with an ever-changing cast of accomplices, comrades, and brutes. Sadly, lots and lots of brutes; slave-catching was a lucrative pursuit and particularly attractive to the lowest of the low. 

Cora travels via a literal underground railroad, to South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and then further west. We observe the topography of slavery from myriad, awful angles. It's a rough journey in every possible way, but thankfully it leads in the direction of redemption. 

I thought, going in, that I was well aware of the depths of the slavery horror but, come to find out, I'd barely plumbed them. It's a terrible thing confronting the fact that man's inhumanity can exceed one's wildest imaginings. The challenge is not to hate back. 

Reading The Underground Railroad was an experience I won't soon forget. It deepened my compassion and increased my understanding. The novel has occupied the bestseller list for over 30 weeks now, which is heartening. Maybe compassion and understanding will start to go viral.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler is not the sort of book I normally read, but my daughter works in the restaurant business, so we decided to read it together. She read a paper copy and I listened to audio. This novel earned its young debut-author a six-figure advance but it's meeting with mixed reviews; critics are swooning but readers aren't so smitten: on Goodreads, they're more inclined to three stars.

Sweetbitter tells the story of Tess, a 22-year-old Midwesterner who, in 2006, leaves home to move, solo, to New York City, where she quickly lands a back-waiter position at one of New York's most prestigious restaurants (a loosely disguised Union Square Café).

What follows is the narrative of her exhilarating, heartbreaking, exhausting, energizing new life. There's a great deal of food and wine talk, lots and lots of drugs, and a generous helping of sex. Foodies will enjoy the book for the truffles, figs, and oysters alone. It's the alcohol- and drug-fueled decadence that seems to turn some readers off, but my daughter confirms that the lifestyle Danler depicts is spot-on for many in the industry.

Sweetbitter looks, and occasionally reads, like a nice bit of fluff, but the novel is more than a beach book. It's got some meat on its bones. For one thing, Danler can write and she has a wonderful eye for the telling detail, whether it's the look, smell, and feel of a rapidly altering New York City or the devastating after-effects of an over-the-top binge. The rigors of restaurant work are nicely drawn too, and we get a genuine feel for staff camaraderie, liaisons, and clashes, the flawless nights of almost-choreographed service and the nights that are slapstick fiascos.

I found the book's ending to be something of a disappointment. That aside, what impressed me most about the book is the author's psychological acuity. She describes her character's loneliness in the vast, churning city, or her sudden recognition of the shallowness of her staff friendships, and the reader feels these things too. For all her callow youth, Tess's observations are often wise beyond her years and it's a testament to the author that they so often ring true.

Audio Notes: the audiobook narrator takes a little getting used to --  her voice is husky, characterized by what reviewers call "vocal fry," but once I adjusted, I enjoyed her nuanced reading. She's great with accents too and has some fun with southern, Bronx, and heavy Russian ones. 

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance

Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance, now in its 28th week on the New York Times bestseller list, is a memoir written and published at just the right time, as Americans coast to coast struggle to figure out how we got ourselves into the violently polarized political mess we're in.

Vance, a self-described hillbilly who is now a Silicon Valley investment-firm lawyer, offers his take on the subject with this story of his upbringing. Originally from Kentucky, his family hit the Hillbilly Highway as part of the early-to-mid 20th century migration of Appalachians to northern Rust Belt cities. At the time those cities were thriving; now many are as hopeless as the hollers from which the migrants fled.

Vance's early life makes for fascinating, if heartbreaking, reading. There's lots of bad judgment on the part of his elders. Plenty of poor life decisions. Much substance abuse, violence, and bad grammar. But despite the dysfunction of his mother and most of her men, Vance grew to appreciate the value of effort and education. This was largely due to his grandmother, Mamaw, a firebrand who once doused her drunken husband with gasoline and dropped a lit match on his chest. (In her defense, she had warned him that she'd do it, he survived largely intact, and he was less inclined to get hammered ever after.) Mamaw also saw to it that Vance did his homework. Her house became his real home.

His academic diligence, followed by a stint in the Marines, paid off handsomely, winning him entry to Ohio State and Yale Law School. Depending upon your point of view, the pages that narrate the courting of Yale law-school students by the most powerful of the big corporate law firms may strike you as almost as nauseating as the hillbilly dysfunction. Vance himself seems OK with it, although he has a lot of proper-fork-for-the-course learning to do.

And that's my main problem with this book. While plenty of critical (and admittedly compelling) attention is paid to the degraded state of the shiftless "have-nots," not much is said about the culpability of the "haves," those on the privileged side of our Grand-Canyon-sized income gap, the side Vance fled to with the speed of a famished cheetah. But not everyone can become a Silicon Valley millionaire or a corporate CEO. I wish Vance had given more thought to what his influential new crowd might do to improve the lives of all those hillbillies back home.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead may be the best book I read in 2016. I read it (twice!), just after the unsavory election season ended, deciding I'd forego the news for a while and lose myself in a really good book. The result was amazing. Not only did I love the book, but I found myself going about my business in a much better mood.

My Life in Middlemarch is an English major's dream, a hybrid work of nonfiction: one part memoir and four parts literary biography. Mead's subjects are the great Victorian writer George Eliot (born Mary Anne Evans) and her masterpiece, Middlemarch, which multiple critics have suggested may be "the greatest novel in the English language." 

Middlemarch is Mead's favorite book for sure, one she re-reads every few years. She finds that the novel speaks to her in new and compelling ways every time, as she navigates her way through life's milestones: moving away from home for the first time, finding a life's work, beginning and ending relationships, acquiring a family.

I've been in love with Middlemarch myself for a long time, so it's hard for me to judge how Mead's book will strike someone who hasn't read it. Eliot's highly unconventional life is certainly fascinating in its own right. As a young woman in the 1840s, Eliot rejected the conservative church-faith of her beloved father and established herself as an independent, free-thinking writer (and to say this was scandalous is an understatement). She next fell in love with a married man who was unable to divorce his estranged wife and she lived with him openly for 24 years. A highly disapproving London society eventually softened its censure somewhat as Eliot became one of the most beloved novelists of her time, right up there with Dickens.

So, if you love English authors, especially the Victorian kind, and you enjoy literary biographies, My Life in Middlemarch may well appeal to you. For maximum enjoyment though, read Middlemarch first. Yes, it's a doorstop, but you'll be glad you picked it up -- and we have it in audio too!

 ~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger

One of the great things about working in a library is that you get to track the books that everyday readers -- not reviewers, prize panels, or critics -- genuinely love, titles like The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah or All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr or, recently, just about every title released by Frederik Backman. I always take note of these books, so I can recommend them to others but also so I can eventually get to them myself. Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger is one such book.

Published in 2013, it's beautifully written, warm-hearted, poignant, and suspenseful. It's a standalone work by an author best known for his Cork O'Connor mystery series set up in northern Minnesota, a series that is also well-loved. Krueger is known for his evocative descriptions of landscapes and places and his incorporation of Native American characters and culture into his books, both features prominent in Ordinary Grace.

The novel relates the events of one hot summer in Minnesota in 1961. Kennedy is president and the mood of the country hopeful, but the sleepy town of New Bremen experiences a series of unfortunate -- no, make that tragic -- events.

We see these incidents unfold through the eyes of thirteen-year-old Frank Drum, son of the town's Methodist minister, whose family is a happy one despite the usual assortment of disappointments and challenges: Frank's mom, an aspiring singer, isn't thrilled to have landed in a backwater leading a church choir; Frank's spiritually gifted younger brother struggles with a stutter; Frank's brilliant older sister bears the scars of a surgically repaired hairlip; Frank's father conceals psychic scars from the second World War. All five family members are very well drawn and the large supporting cast of townspeople is rendered just as skillfully.   

Frank begins the summer a regular kid, pre-occupied with baseball and the usual early-teen boy things. Then, a series of three unrelated deaths occur that cause his world to crack open. These deaths set off a chain of further unfortunate events, perhaps to an extent that stretches the reader's credulity just a bit. I was willing to suspend my disbelief because Krueger writes so well, in such convincing detail, and with so much compassion. He keeps the reader turning pages too, to find out who did what to whom. But what he really examines through these plot detonations is the harsh truth that awful things do happen to good people, but those people can find the strength and courage -- and enough ordinary grace in this world -- to go on.

There's nothing saccharine about Krueger's cast or facile in the ways they cope in the aftermath. Krueger offers no easy answers. His people are flawed, they spend nights in the drunk tank, they make big mistakes, they can't always forgive. But they are caring and authentic and thoughtful. In the end there is something so life-affirming in the world Krueger creates. His book is exquisitely graceful.

~ Ann, Adult Services    

Staff Audiobook Review: The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard

I don't know why it has taken me almost twenty years to notice the essay collection The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard and read (or, rather, listen to) it. First published in 1998 to a loud chorus of high praise, the book led to Beard's being awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award.

The collection constitutes a patchwork memoir. At the time of its publication, it drew most attention for one piece, previously published in the The New Yorker. That essay, "The Fourth State of Matter," is a meticulous and heartbreaking narrative of the 1991 mass shooting at the University of Iowa by a disturbed physics graduate student, which claimed six lives, including the shooter's, and left another victim paralyzed from the neck down. The narrative of that horrific event is woven into finely-grained depictions of the author's own domestic woes: a dying dog and dissolving marriage. It makes for a poignant weave that in no way diminishes the relative magnitude of the shooting.

Jo Ann Beard, a graduate of the University of Iowa and of Iowa's MFA writing program, was an editor of the physics department's academic journal at the time of the shootings and very close to several of the victims. She had left the office early that day to tend to her old, ailing pet. At home, her phone soon began ringing off the hook. In her essay, which, like all the essays in the book, is precisely detailed, wryly but not inappropriately funny, and strikingly well-written, Beard conjures the tragedy in such a vividly authentic way that I listened, heart in throat, grieved for the victims, and glimpsed the scale of the incident's extensive collateral damage.

Other essays breathe life into Beard's early childhood, adolescence, high school and college beaus, and her ultimately failed marriage. She presents her life in a non-linear way, each essay forming its own discrete story. Beard is a master of the exquisite detail and one has to wonder at her powers of recollection and suspect some poetic license in the telling. Usually I'm pretty particular about strict truth in the memoirs I read, but this book is so artfully written and profoundly affecting that I was willing to park my skepticism at the door.

Her masterful handling of a seemingly infinite number of precise details results in one stunning piece after another. Her mother, especially, is finely-wrought and we see exactly where Beard gets her cleverness and wry humor, which are powerful mechanisms in a book that depicts so much dysfunction, disorder, death, and divorce. As I listened, my heart's pangs were frequently accompanied by my laughter. I've rarely experienced such a seamless blend of humor and sorrow.

The author reads this audiobook and does a serviceable job. She sounds a little hypnotized, but she has written a hypnotic book so maybe it's fitting. And her deadpan delivery of very funny material only accentuates the humor. Jo Ann Beard is one sharp woman and I highly recommend this audiobook.

~Ann, Adult Services 

Staff Review: Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell

Anyone who has read one of Sarah Vowell's books knows how funny she is. Laugh-out-loud funny at times. But when it comes to American history, she knows her stuff. Hers is a fresh take on what we all learned in school: the Puritans on the Mayflower, our past presidents, the Salem witch trials, the Civil War. Sometimes she goes farther afield: in one book, Unfamiliar Fishes, she explores the events leading up to the U.S. annexation of Hawaii. Vowell is snarky, irreverent, and a whole lot of fun. Always droll, never dull, often remarkably astute, she breathes new life into old stories.

In Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, her most recent book, she really shows off her chops. I can't imagine how much reading, research, and travel must have gone in to writing this book. Vowell seems at ease with all the major battles of the Revolutionary War, which went on for eight long years, and with all the key players, from military leaders like George Washington and Benedict Arnold to members of the Continental Congress. Her focus is on Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, better known as the Marquis de Lafayette, a 19-year-old French aristocrat who crossed the ocean in 1776 to take up the cause of American liberty. Swashbuckling and debonair, he became not only a highly capable general but a sort of surrogate son to Washington, who was crazy about him.

The book opens with Lafayette's return to the U.S. in 1824, at age 67, for a grand tour of all (by then) 24 states. Americans still adored him for his contributions to the cause of freedom and he was greeted by cheering crowds everywhere he went. By that time, he had not only survived the American Revolution (he was wounded at the Battle of Brandywine) but also emerged neck intact from "the Terror" -- the bloody chaos of the French Revolution, with its flames, pitchforks, and flashing guillotine. Vowell then turns back in time to the trajectory of the American Revolution, interspersing her own clever assessment of historical events with anecdotes about people she meets and sites she visits while conducting her extensive research.

She is so amiable in her snarkiness that I always finish her books wishing I could hang out with her. I also laugh and learn a lot along the way. By the close of this one, I understood for the very first time just how much the French helped us win the War of Independence (something we might have done well to remember during the Freedom-fries fiasco of 2003) and I had a much better appreciation of the reason so many American cities, towns, counties, hills, rivers, bridges, parks, schools, boats, and buildings were named in honor of Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette.

Cautionary Note: I better add a note about the audio version. When you hear Vowell for the first time (she narrates her own books), you may well be a bit turned off, especially if you're just coming off a super-fine audiobook narrator. For all that Vowell's such a big radio personality and has done so much voice and acting work, her high-pitched, lispy, little-kid voice can be dismaying, but I promise if you power through the first chapter or two, you'll cease to notice. It won't bother you at all. You may even come to find it endearing.

~Ann, Adult Services 

Staff Review: My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

The publication of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels (a quartet) has been one of the biggest literary events of the century (granted, we're only sixteen years in, but still). To say Ferrante has gathered brilliant accolades, that she's garnered the wildest acclaim, would be an understatement. The publishing industry and the media have already inducted her into the literary pantheon. For this reason, and because the slim Europa paperbacks that embody her U.S. translations are so attractive, I finally took the plunge. At this point I'm two books in.

Ferrante herself is a mystery woman. No one knows who she is, what she looks like, or where she lives. This in itself, in an age of massive media attention to every big new thing, is remarkable and might reasonably be perceived as a sort of media blitz of its own (search "Elena Ferrante's identity" and you get over 100,000 results). Everyone is speculating, guessing, even claiming to have found her. If she remains elusive, it will be a marvel.

So, what do I think of the quartet halfway in? I'd have to say I like them, I dislike them, and I can't seem to put them down. Ferrante creates an exquisitely detailed world that spans decades and brings Naples to life politically and culturally. The story line follows the friendship of two Neapolitan girls born just after World War II. They're five or six as My Brilliant Friend begins and about twenty as the second novel, The Story of a New Name, concludes (they'll be going on seventy by the end of the series).

Elena and Lila were born in the same poor, violent neighborhood in Naples, where husbands beat wives, brothers beat sisters, parents beat kids, and the typical hissed threat is "Do that again and so help me God I will kill you." At that time in Italy, feminism wasn't a concept nor was divorce legal; the lives of many Italian women were bleak. Many men's lives weren't so great either.

Elena, the studious good girl, and Lila, the rebel, are both unusually bright but only Elena completes high school and even goes on to college. Over the years the girls' friendship waxes and wanes, sometimes breaking off tumultuously. Events play out within a large cast of neighborhood characters: family members, schoolmates, boyfriends, teachers, parents, shopkeepers, and the notorious Solara family, linked to the Camorra (Neapolitan organized crime), whose members control the neighborhood through loansharking, extortion, threats, beatings, and even murder.

It's not the novels' gritty setting with its violence and corruption that, at times, turns me off. It's the wildly unpredictable nature of Elena and Lila's friendship. At times Lila's a true-blue friend and at other times she behaves in unpredictable, despicable, and cruel ways. She hurts Elena again and again. Of course, it can certainly be said that she hurts herself more. Elena gets in a few licks too, at one point dumping a box of Lila's journals, painstakingly written over the years and entrusted to Elena's care, into the Arno River. Their breaches can make for tough reading. 

Reviewing this series in the Financial Times, the novelist Claire Messud wrote, "I end up thinking that the people who don't see Ferrante's genius are those who can't face her uncomfortable truths: that women's friendships are as much about hatred as love . . . ." I guess I can't -- or don't -- accept that particular "truth," but I also can't stop reading the novels; I'm just about to start book three, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. Ferrante has created a series that's powerfully compelling. And, in the end, maybe my love/hate relationship with it is fitting. After all, Lila and Elena love and hate each other for over sixty years. Maybe I'm just not Neapolitan enough to get it.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson

If you're a fan of Jane Austen and other 19th century novelists of life and love in quaint villages of long-ago England, you should not miss The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson. Although it begins in 1914, on the eve of World War I, it quickly put me in mind of those earlier authors, with its exquisite village setting, its jumble of aristocrats and commoners, and its lavish period detail about dress, food, furniture, customs, and manners.

The novel begins slowly, as a charming tale of coastal village life at "the end of England's brief Edwardian summer." The weather has rarely been so glorious. Young, pretty, free-thinking -- and penniless -- Beatrice arrives to take her controversial place as the local grammar school's new Latin master, a position that until now has always been filled by a man. Her conditional hire situates Beatrice within a large cast of characters and allows Simonson to tackle the subject of the subjugation of women in the early twentieth century, which she succeeds at doing very well without being heavy-handed.

The rumblings of war draw closer however, Belgian refugees soon arrive in the village, and before long all are swept up in the years of bloody and tumultuous fighting that will eventually claim over 17 million lives, wound 20 million more, and end forever many of the old European ways of living. Despite the chaos into which the period descends, Simonson succeeds in bringing history vividly to life and her characters and story to satisfying conclusions.

Simonson's mastery of her material is astonishing, especially considering this is only her second novel, the first being the highly acclaimed and equally delightful Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. She's a natural born storyteller. Her characters rarely hit a false note, historical detail is fluidly rendered, and the writing is well-crafted, witty, and intelligent. There's no treacle here either; certain scenes are hard to take. People suffer atrocities, reputations are hurt, class cruelty abounds, and a few characters do not survive to the end. In constructing this intricate tale of love, class, and war, Simonson never settles for confection but hews to the genuine and authentic.  

~ Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson

It's been twenty years since Iowan-turned-Englishman Bill Bryson wrote Notes from a Small Island, relating his 1995 trip around Great Britain. The book wound up being the most successful travel book ever, with 2.5 million copies sold to date. So, Bryson's publisher, with "little glinting pound signs" in his eyes, suggested Bryson do it again, with a different itinerary this time of course.

The result is The Road to Little Dribbling, written just as Bryson passes his test to become a British citizen (his wife is English). His itinerary this time roughly follows the so-called Bryson Line, a line he invents linking the two most far-flung points in Britain, Bognor Regis and Cape Wrath, as the crow flies. Bryson perambulates this route, with numerous side-trips to London (his favorite city in the world, a city with more green space than any other in Europe). 

His travel commentary is entertaining and often very funny. Those who have read Bryson know he's a real curmudgeon; this work confirms that his curmudgeonliness has moved to the next level. Some reviewers have called him on this, saying he's become an over-the-top crank, but I found his grousing largely amusing and was more annoyed by his penchant for acting "over the hill" and in his "dotage" (at 63) when it's clear that he is as sharp as ever and can easily walk for miles. Why pretend to be decrepit? Besides, his crankiness is more than offset by the loving tribute he pays throughout the book to the stunning beauty of Britain's natural landscape and to her countless cathedrals, monuments, museums, and other historical sites. Britain's a bottomless treasure trove for art buffs, book lovers, historians, and nature enthusiasts. 

Sadly, not all of Britain is doing very well these days. Bryson pays visits to formerly vibrant villages and resort towns now well on their way to dying, leading him to make caustic remarks about the government's austerity measures. In the main though, this book will leave you yearning to cross the Atlantic and see for yourself  “how casually strewn with glory Britain is.”  

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg

Did You Ever Have a Family, a debut novel by Bill Clegg, opens with a bang. Literally. A big one. In the scale of the whole wide world, it may not be a cataclysm, but in the more modest scale of family and community it's catastrophic. In an instant the novel's main character loses everyone and everything; she's rendered family-less in the blink of an eye, yet she must find a way to go on. What choice does she have, other than suicide?

By this point you may be thinking this book does not sound like a feel-good read and that you probably ought to avoid it. But that would be a mistake. I found it to be one of the most moving, most human, and ultimately most redemptive novels I've read this past year and I heartily recommend it.

After the opening big bang, Clegg beautifully and succinctly relates not only the incident's aftermath but also years of backstory -- the relationships and events -- that lead to this particular cast of doomed characters being together in one place on the incendiary day. The wider network of relatives, friends, acquaintances, and even service workers affected by the tragedy, closely or tangentially, is painstakingly introduced, person by person within their own chapters, their individual humanities brought to life in a series of exquisite scenes that move from the affluent Connecticut 'burbs of New York City through Montana and Idaho and on to the turbulent coast of the Pacific Northwest.

What is particularly impressive about this novel is the even-handed and compassionate way in which Clegg presents his characters, people of very different income and educational levels, racial backgrounds, sexual preferences, and social standing. The catastrophe at the core of the plot has wounded them all and in their raw vulnerability they slowly rise to the occasion, becoming more rather than less, reaching out to one another, and, in the end, forming new communities based not upon occupation, class, or local reputation, but upon more basic and authentic aspects of being human.

Before tackling fiction, Clegg, a literary agent, wrote two memoirs about his own devastating drug addiction; it seems his descent into the abyss and eventual restoration are serving him well in his fiction.

~Ann, Adult Services

Book Tips for Travelers

Travel brings with it a change in your daily routine. Whether you're on the road for fun or for business, you're bound to have at least a little free time, which, if you're a book lover, translates to reading time. As a lover of both books and travel, I thought I'd share some of the tips I've learned over the years for the upcoming summer travel season.

 Switch it up! Tackle your To Be Read list

• A vacation is a great time to read a book you wouldn't usually, whether it's the sort of serious reading that demands extra attention or something light and fluffy you'd otherwise feel guilty taking time off to read.

Busy schedule? Try short stories

• Short story collections are great for when you'll only have 30-minutes or so at a time to read between everything else because you can usually read an entire story in that time!
• Added bonus, an anthology will let you sample multiple authors to see if you'd like to read their full-length novels when you have more free time.

eBooks: the easiest way to bring the entire library with you

• Already on the road? Our OverDrive collection of eBooks and downloadable audiobooks are available anywhere you have internet access.

Audiobooks: the only way to read a book while you're driving a car

• MP3 audiobooks let you listen to an entire 12+ hour audiobook on only two discs.
• In addition to our OverDrive collection, we have even more downloadable audiobooks available through One Click Digital.

Paper Books: the only books you don't have to stop reading during take-off and landing

• Nothing beats a paper book for reading in bright sun, and you never have to worry about recharging!
• They're easy to swap among friends and family, which is how I've discovered some of my favorite books.
• Don't want to risk one of your books or a library book? The Friends of the Library always have books for sale on the library's second floor, and the prices can't be beat!

Digital Magazines: we've got those too

• Check out the latest issue on your tablet or smartphone with your library card through our Zinio app.

Long Trip? Suspend your holds

• Been waiting for the latest James Patterson or Star Wars: The Force Awakens? Don't lose your spot, suspend your holds until you get back, and yes, we can do this for you over the phone.

~Sarah, Adult Services

Staff Review: My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

My Name Is Lucy Barton is the third novel I've read by Elizabeth Strout. I began reading her in 2008 when she published Olive Kitteridge, which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and became an HBO four-part mini-series starring Frances McDormand.

I'm always a little puzzled by my relationship with this author. Her characters sometimes put me off with their razor-sharp tongues, relentless sarcasm, and the cloying dysfunction within which they live, and yet there is also something so compelling about her novels that I find myself reading her again.

So, what is it? In part it's her intelligence and in part her settings -- I love stories that unfold in New England. She's also a wonderful wordsmith. Her novels revolve around families, their interactions, traumas, and flaws.

In Strout's newest novel, Lucy Barton comes from a poverty-stricken, emotionally-crippled family, a family that frequently goes hungry and lives without benefit of heat, books, television, decent clothes, and any normal displays of affection. When her parents go out, they lock little Lucy in a truck at home, one time, inadvertently, with a snake.

Lucy manages to break away from her unlovely kin via college and an interest in writing. Years later, as a young wife and mother, she finds herself stuck in a hospital for weeks with an unspecified infection. To her great surprise, her estranged mother shows up and camps out in Lucy's room, and the two spend hours talking, gossipy talk mostly, about people from the past. Her mother then leaves and the uncharacteristic bonding's over. While it lasts though, Lucy's in deep mother-love and happy.

Strout's achievement in this short novel is her very human understanding, her compassion for Lucy's badly flawed family members, who made her childhood such a misery, and her realistic offering of an alternate way of life. As a Boston Globe reviewer notes in her glowing review: The "psychic wounds of her childhood are part of Lucy, but they do not define her. We see this as we watch her find her place in the world, learn how to be ruthless for her art, and come to understand that while humiliation is unacceptable, humility is essential."

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: The Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos

Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos, the 2014 National Book Award winner for nonfiction, is Carnegie-Stout's adult book-discussion selection for June. The discussion will take place June 14th at 7 PM and there's a lot to discuss! Osnos presents everyday life in the new economically-booming China. His focus is on the years 2005 - 2013, which he spent in China as correspondent for The Chicago Tribune and The New Yorker magazine.

I wanted to read this book because China has dominated the news for so many years now, yet I had no real sense of what it's like to live there. We hear what sounds like good news: greater prosperity, rising standards of living, economic development, increased openness, but we also hear the bad: staggering levels of corruption, pollution, shoddy construction, economic inequality, censorship. So, what is it really like to live in China today?

Osnos is a good writer and a faultlessly objective journalist. I could detect no political ideology on his part, and he pays the same respect and attention to pro-democracy individuals that he pays to those who are strongly one-party nationalistic. He presents China more anecdotally than statistically, having conducted his research by talking to hundreds of people: interviewing individuals with a wide variety of outlooks, occupations, and incomes; building long-term relationships; traveling broadly; tracking people and issues over time. Living in the polarized political environment that constitutes the United States today, I was almost taken aback by his ability to report without bias. His narrative is fascinating, comprehensive, and human.

That said, I found the picture he paints of life in China today to be grim. A sense of oppression settled over me as I read and didn't lift until close to the end of the book, when Osnos speaks to the growing demand by the Chinese people for governmental transparency, truthful news, freedoms of information and expression, cleaner air, ethical codes of business, the right to spiritual or religious lives, and on and on. There's no doubt he is right about that growing demand, but the most recently selected governing body of the Chinese Communist Party, which he describes in the book's final chapters, gives little sign of acquiescing in any way (and, in fact, quite the opposite), and as with all authoritarian regimes, they oversee and censor all media outlets, including the Internet, and control the military, police, and weaponry. The coming years should be very interesting.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: The Expatriates by Janice Y. K. Lee

The Expatriates is Janice Y. K. Lee's second novel. (Her first, The Piano Teacher, received glowing reviews from editors if not from all readers.) This new effort is a compelling read about affluent ex-pats in bustling, present-day Hong Kong. The city is temporary home to thousands of lawyers and business-people, who, along with their families, are all benefiting quite nicely from the global economy.

Set within -- but also in stark relief against -- this backdrop of monied privilege are the troubled lives of three very different women, from whose rotating vantage point the novel is narrated.

Mercy, a young Korean-American Columbia grad, has come to Hong Kong to try to find the big, fancy job that has thus far eluded her back in the States. Hilary, a 38-year-old with a troubled, or, more accurately, receding marriage, is unable to conceive the child she so wants. Margaret, the beautiful, kind, nearly impeccable landscape architect, has left her career behind to accompany her husband to Hong Kong, where the whole family suffers a tragic event that leaves them (and this reader) reeling.

I enjoyed this novel very much. Unlike the characters in too many novels these days, these women are sympathetic, although not always entirely likable. Like all of us, they make mistakes and they pay the price. The novel resolves nicely too, in a realistic way that may not satisfy those who crave really happy endings but doesn't leave the reader at all hopeless either. The author does a wonderful job of evoking the lifestyles of those for whom Asia is both workplace and playground, while at the same time demonstrating that money is often of very little value when it comes to solving serious personal problems. In a money-mad age, we sometimes forget that last bit.

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: The Rocks by Peter Nichols

My review focuses on the audio version of The Rocks by Peter Nichols because while I'm sure the novel is a fine read on paper (or screen), the audio edition is fantastic. Steve West, who narrates the entire book, deserves the audio equivalent of an Oscar (and, in fact, was nominated twice for an Audie Award in 2015 alone). He's intelligent, appealing, and just overall amazing, equally at home with male and female characters, patricians and proles, the young and the old, the honorable and the dissolute, Parisians, Brits, Hungarians, Italians, Americans. Anybody. The novel bursts to life through his many voices.

The quirk (and at times this reader's confusion) with the book is that it unfolds backwards through time, opening in 2005 with a big splash (literally) and then moving into the past in increments, all the way back to 1948. The Rocks of the title is a lovely hotel perched over the water on the coast of Mallorca. Its proprietress, a commanding woman named Lulu, has been running the hotel for decades and serves as hostess to a tight-knit group of more or less degenerate ex-pats. The arc of her life and its early, brief intersection with the life of a Homer-loving islander named Gerald form the central plot of the novel. Lulu and Gerald each have a child, a boy and a girl whose lives intersect throughout, and their stories are told too.

Few of the novel's characters are entirely likable and the preponderance of missed opportunities, misunderstandings, failures, and sad regrets may wear on the reader's patience and psyche. What kept me going was not only the fabulous Steve West but also the way the book vividly re-creates its times and places -- Mallorca present-day or Morocco in the seventies, for example -- and the genuine voices of the island's denizens, which rarely hit a false note, whether it's a lecherous old has-been rambling on and on, the village police chief, the shop-owner who sells Gerald's almonds and olives, or Gerald himself, gentleman and scholar. The achievement of the book is that even while you're put off by the characters' decadence, or triviality, you still kind of wish you were lying on a sun-bleached rock among them, ocean beside you, sangria in hand.  

~Ann, Adult Services