AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE by Tayari Jones

Roy and Celestial have been married only a year and a half when their world is rocked by a rape accusation against Roy.  Despite his pleas of innocence, he is convicted and sentenced to 12 years, joining the ranks of thousands of incarcerated black men.  He survives in prison largely due to the wisdom of his cellmate, known as the Ghetto Yoda.  Meanwhile, Celestial is starting to make a name for herself as an artist, creating cloth dolls, many of whom look like Roy.  She has to move on with her life, which may or may not include waiting for Roy’s release.  Andre, Celestial’s long-time friend who was best man at their wedding, is more than willing to fill Roy’s shoes at Celestial’s side.  This love triangle is the main conflict in this story and boils down to who will get the girl.  I struggled through this novel until Roy finally gets out of prison, and then all hell breaks loose.  For me, this is when the plot gets quite dramatic, and I really liked the ending.  While he is locked up, Roy has been thinking of nothing but getting back to his wife, and she has left some conflicting signals about where their relationship stands.  I have to side with Celestial on this one, though.  She may be moving on, but she holds off on filing for divorce, because she feels guilty about abandoning Roy, and she’s reluctant to kick a man while he’s down.  She’s certainly in a difficult spot, because Roy didn’t deserve his fate, but their marriage was contentious anyway, and I can’t help feeling that it wouldn’t have survived if Roy had never gone to prison.  Maybe they would have ironed out their differences and maybe not, but when you’re looking at a 12-year hiatus in your very new marriage, I think you have to be realistic and consider other options.

HISTORY OF WOLVES by Emily Fridlund

Fourteen-year-old Linda and her parents are the only remaining vestiges of a hippie commune in an isolated area of backwoods Minnesota.  Her world changes when she meets Patra Gardner, young mother of four-year-old Paul, whose death the author mentions early in the book.  Not until we meet Patra’s astronomer husband Leo do we discover that the couple are Christian Scientists.  Linda is their frequent babysitter, and it’s obvious that Patra desperately seeks the approval of her husband, perhaps at the expense of her son’s well-being.  This is an eerie, haunting book, not just because we know Paul is going to die and we want to know how, but also because the landscape is so cold, natural, and uninhabited.  Linda is an expert at splitting wood and skinning fish, and she’s good with Paul, but she’s not socially mature, although she does attend school and develops a particular rapport with a history teacher who may be a pedophile.  She’s also not convinced that her parents are really her parents, and I shared her skepticism when her tardiness in returning home from the Gardners’ seems to warrant no concerned reaction whatsoever.  In some ways the Gardners are more like family than her own parents, as she becomes more and more of a fixture in their lives.  Linda’s story is poignant, and that’s the same adjective she uses to describe an article about Princess Diana in a purloined People magazine.  She definitely seems drawn to sad people, including a girl from school who lies about contact with the suspicious history teacher.  This is a book that can even make a game of Candyland heartbreaking.

QUIET DELL by Jayne Anne Phillips

Don’t let the peaceful-sounding title fool you.  This novel revolves around the real-life serial killer, Herman Drenth, aka Harry Powers, aka Cornelius Pierson, who preyed upon lonely women during the Great Depression.  He was finally caught in West Virginia after murdering Asta Eicher and her three children.  The book opens with the widowed Asta living in her deceased mother-in-law’s home.  She is financially desperate and allows herself to be conned by Drenth via a correspondence in which he promises to marry her.  This first section is a bit slow-moving, but, while Asta is excited about her new life, the reader experiences a sense of dread that is fully realized soon enough.  Enter Emily Thornhill, a fictional reporter for the Chicago Tribune, who becomes very attached to the Eicher children in absentia and provides a welcome breath of fresh air against the gruesome backdrop of the murders.  Like In Cold Blood, to which this novel has been compared, the murders are a fait accompli, and Emily serves as a conduit to the killer’s backstory and the buildup to his trial.  The author may go a little too far in counter-balancing the brutal murders with Emily’s many successes and good fortune, but I found her pluck and perseverance to be refreshing, though certainly no one could mistake her almost fairy-tale life as fact.  The author artfully manages to keep the reader’s eyes glued to the pages, not only with Drenth’s history and the lynch mob that forces his removal to a more secure prison, but with the assorted lovable and good-hearted characters that surround Emily, including her gay photographer, a street urchin that she befriends, and the Eicher’s dog Duty.  Certainly, this blend of good and evil is intentional on the author’s part, and I think it works extremely well.

THE CHILD by Fiona Barton

When an infant’s skeleton is uncovered at a building site, journalist Kate Waters is eager to get the scoop.  The baby may be Alice Irving, who was abducted from her mother’s maternity ward room while her mother, Angela, took a quick shower.  However, the age of the baby’s remains is a big question that the police must address, and the timeline may not align with Alice’s disappearance.  Thank heavens for DNA testing.  Another woman, Emma, who once lived near the excavation site, seems anxious to learn the baby’s identity, but we don’t find out why until later in the book.  Jude, Emma’s sometimes estranged mother, also is faithfully following the story of the building site baby as it unfolds.  Kate is an empathetic and caring woman who hopes to bring Angela some closure, while at the same time bringing a blockbuster story to print.  I enjoyed this book—the writing style, the format, the pace, the characters, and the plot.  However, I guessed what had happened about halfway into the book, so that the denouement was pretty much a non-event for me.  I think the author could have done a much better job of making the mystery more of a mystery and not telegraphing the outcome plainly.  In fact, this has got to be one of the most obvious mysteries I’ve read lately, and the coincidence factor is also extremely high, making the plot somewhat farfetched.  That said, I raced through this novel, partly because it’s a page-turner and partly because I was eager to put it behind me so that I could move on to something without a forgone conclusion.

FAITHFUL by Alice Hoffman

Shelby was driving on an icy road when the car spun out, putting her best friend Helene in a permanent coma.  Shelby is emotionally dead herself with guilt and spends some time in a mental facility where an orderly routinely rapes her.  The rapes may seem quite unnecessary to the plot, but they serve as an impetus to get her out of there when she is nowhere near healed.  When she returns home, she shaves her head and spends a lot of time with Ben, her pot supplier.  Anonymous postcards start arriving that urge her to Do Something, See Something, Believe Something, etc.  She and Ben eventually move in together, and he adores her, but she is restless and cheats on him with a handsome veterinarian.  I thought the affair was a little out of character, but basically I guess she’s looking for approval and perhaps even proving to herself that she’s not worthy of Ben’s affection.  In penance for what she did to Helene, she rescues every abused dog that she sees and becomes somewhat of an all-around good Samaritan.  Except for the unwise affair, she’s a very appealing character and even proves that she has the knack for parenting when she babysits a co-worker’s children.  I cheered her on throughout the book, and I think this is my favorite Alice Hoffman novel, even though it’s pretty much your standard redemption novel.  I am not a fan of her historical fiction, but this one does not fall into that category, and her signature magical realism is mostly absent as well.  Even without the magical realism, the book’s credibility is stretched at times, and it’s certainly not a literary masterpiece, but so what?