THE LITTLE FRIEND by Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt crafts each sentence so meticulously that it’s no wonder she writes only one book every ten years.  This novel takes place in the fictional town of Alexandria, Mississippi, not far from my home town of Memphis, in the 1970s.  Reminiscent of Faulkner in its setting and its subject matter, this story takes place during one summer in which precocious 12-year-old Harriet sets out to avenge the hanging of her brother when Harriet was an infant.  Harriet has to rely on her elderly aunts, her grandmother, and her household’s black maid for adult role models and supervision, since her mother has never recovered emotionally from her son’s death.  Harriet’s nemesis is Danny Ratliff, who may or may not have murdered her brother, and his family is dysfunctional in a completely different way.  One brother, Eugene, is intent on becoming a snake-handling preacher, and the other, Farish, is cooking crystal meth, with a taxidermy business on the side as a cover.  Some reviewers have deemed this a coming-of-age story, but I see it as an adventure that gets out of hand.  Harriet and her partner-in-crime, a boy named Hely, get in way over their heads by threatening the Ratliff brothers, particularly since Eugene and Farish are completely whacked out on their own product.  I really felt sorry for these ne’er-do-well Ratliff men whose grandmother constantly warns them that they will never escape their impoverished roots.  For me, this psychological beating is almost more devastating than a physical assault.  It just seems so much more difficult to overcome.  My biggest disappointment in this book was the ending.  The suspense and excitement grow right up until the last page with no clear resolution.  After reading 600+ pages, I was expecting a more satisfying conclusion.  The author leaves us with clues about what will happen next, but I wasn’t really sure if all of the clues were reliable.

THE GIVER OF STARS by Jojo Moyes

It’s the 1930s, and Alice’s marriage is a sham.  She and her husband Bennett live in the same house as Bennett’s father, who owns a coal mine in rural Kentucky.  The community has begun a library service that delivers books to families who live in the wooded hills nearby.  Alice seizes the opportunity to escape her unfulfilled life by volunteering as one of the packhorse librarians.  She is an accomplished horsewoman from England, and soon finds that this job basically gives her a whole new family.  The other three librarians have their own reasons for joining the group, but the most independent of these is Margery, their defacto leader.  After having cried my way through Me Before You, I was not enthusiastic about reading another JoJo Moyes novel, but I found myself racing through this book and, yes, stopping at intervals to wipe the tears from my eyes, particularly as I neared the end.  It’s formulaic and melodramatic, and the writing is so-so, but I can’t deny that Moyes has a knack for eliciting emotion from the reader, in a manipulative sort of way.  Alice is the main character, but Margery as her mentor is the book’s heart and soul and is as ornery as her mule, Charley.  The book has conflict galore but mainly in the person of Alice’s father-in-law.  He is rotten to the core with his disregard for the safety of the miners and their families, and he’s as mean as a snake when it comes to his expectations of women in general and the packhorse librarians in particular, especially Alice and Margery.  He is about as one-dimensional a character as they come, and Bennett cowers in his father’s shadow.  There are a few good men as well, and they are just as one-dimensional in the opposite direction.  This may not be great literature, but I unabashedly enjoyed my hours with these strong women who are even stronger together.

THE SPLENDID AND THE VILE by Erik Larson

This book may not be as great as its main character, but it is still pretty great.  I am not a history buff, but Erik Larson always makes historical narratives enthralling by adding personal insight into the daily lives of people—Churchill in this case—whose impact on the world is immeasurable.  Here Larson covers a year of Churchill’s life and work, beginning with his appointment as Prime Minister in 1940.  The book is an intimate portrait of his family and his closest friends and advisers.  Much of the information comes from the diary of one of his secretaries, John Colville, who apparently comments on Churchill’s family at least as much as his own personal life.  Although this is Churchill’s story, the book also contains a decent amount of information about the inner workings and strategies of the Nazi government.  Hitler’s chief propagandist, Goebbels, makes the staggering assessment in his diary that “If he [Churchill] had come to power in 1933, we [the Germans] would not be where we are today.”  On the British side, much credit also goes to Lord Beaverbrook, who miraculously whips the disorganized British aircraft industry into shape.  Churchill’s oratory gifts are basically what keeps the country afloat, boosting morale even as German bombs are exploding all over England.  His words also target another audience—Roosevelt and the American people.  Desperate for help from the U.S., Churchill walks a fine line between depicting Britain as fighting a losing battle and being fine on its own.  Finally, Pearl Harbor changes everything.

ISAAC'S STORM by Erik Larson

Isaac Cline is the Isaac in the title of this terrific book about the Galveston hurricane of 1900.  His hubris makes him an anti-hero, but he is not half as bad as his superiors in the Weather Bureau in Washington.  It’s one thing to underestimate the impact of a storm, but to blatantly deny those who have first-hand information the ability to disseminate that information is criminally corrupt.  Isaac is foolhardy in his confidence that a hurricane can never hit Galveston and that his house can withstand any storm that nature might send its way.  Granted, there were no satellites in 1900, and meteorologists had scant information as to where a storm was at any given time, especially if the storm was currently over water.  Still, the assumptions they made were not only deadly, but they seemed to have no basis in reality whatsoever.  This book should serve as a warning to any leader that downplays Mother Nature’s power.  This story is gripping, especially as the author introduces us to various people in the town, as well as those who found themselves in transit via railway to Galveston as the storm hit.  Larson tells us of human losses in a very human way and leaves us with images that we are not likely to forget, such as a group of children strung together to an adult with clothesline, only to drown when the line gets caught in the myriad debris.  This book has lessons galore but also stories of survival under devastating and dangerous circumstances.  It also has a few surprises.  Who knew that some people died from snakebites? 

THE DUTCH HOUSE by Ann Patchett

Danny Conroy may be the first-person narrator of this book (I’m always little thrown off by male first-person narrators of books penned by female authors), but the house in the title carries more influence than many of the human characters.  Danny and his older sister Maeve grow up in this house, mostly without the presence of their do-gooder mother, who is appalled by the ostentatious structure that feels to her more like a museum than a home.  She abandons her children to help the poor in India, and her husband carelessly marries a pretty golddigger, who morphs into a wicked stepmother in no time.  This premise may not sound very original, but in the hands of a great writer like Patchett, it doesn’t have to be.  I will say that I had no difficulty putting the book down, until a revelation about halfway through the book grabbed my attention temporarily.  My excitement quickly fizzled, but no matter.  This is basically a sibling story where the older sister becomes the surrogate mother, and although I realize that’s not very original, either, Maeve and Danny’s relationship is the glue that holds this novel together.  One of my favorite passages in the book is Danny’s comparison of a hospital’s layout to a cancer that grows willy-nilly, as wings are bequeathed and added to the building in haphazard fashion.  How true.  I like a number of Patchett’s novels more (Taft, The Magician’s Assistant, State of Wonder, Bel Canto), but I still found this to be a satisfying and enjoyable read, though possibly not memorable.

THE MAGICIAN'S ASSISTANT by Ann Patchett

This book was such a delight that it made me want to downgrade all the other books I’ve read lately.  It also made me want to hug my loved ones as close to me as possible.  “Parsifal is dead.”  That’s the first sentence of the novel, and it sets everything in motion.  The book is about his widow, Sabine, who also served as Parsifal’s assistant in his magic acts, including an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and performances in Las Vegas.  Parsifal, however, was gay, and was preceded in death by his true love, Phan.  For estate purposes, Parsifal marries Sabine after Phan’s death.  If this sounds like an odd triangle, it really is not.  Sabine was in love with Parsifal but understood that her feelings would never be reciprocated, although the two were extremely close.  After Parsifal’s death, Sabine discovers that almost everything she knew about Parsifal’s childhood is a lie.  This is a story of grief and love and family struggles and a whole lot more, including a few rather scary moments.  An aura of sadness hangs over the book but in a beautiful way rather than a depressing or melodramatic way, as Sabine immerses herself in Parsifal’s past, by way of the family she never knew he had.  There is also one scene in the book that made me laugh so hard that it brought tears to my eyes.  A particularly turbulent commuter flight has a pilot coming out of the cockpit to reprimand a panicked flight attendant.  I know this may not sound like a funny event, but I could hardly read this passage aloud to my husband without cracking up.

BLINDNESS by Jose Saramago

I’m not sure which is worse—living through a pandemic where you could die or one in which everyone goes blind.  Well, almost everyone.  One character claims to be blind when she really isn’t.  She can only keep up this charade for so long, but in the meantime, she is useful to have around, particularly in an abandoned mental institution that will eventually house over 200 blind people.   Since no unaffected person will dare come into the building, these sightless people are basically on their own.  Food and cleaning products are delivered to their doorstep, but it is awfully hard to keep anything clean when everyone is blind.  The result is pure chaos.  Greedy, vicious new arrivals make the situation even worse.  I found the punctuation in the book—no quotation marks, run-on sentences, spotty identification of speakers—annoying, but I think the author had a purpose with the disorderly dialog, perhaps emphasizing the unavoidable confusion among so many blind people in an unfamiliar place.  It is sort of like Lord of the Flies with adult characters.  I found myself totally immersed in the horrific lives of the people in this well-imagined story and eager to find out what lay in store for them.  Their suffering is unfathomable, and yet their hope for a cure or treatment or a vaccine keeps them struggling to survive.  Most amazing and disturbing, though, is that even as more and more people become blind, the government still suggests the possibility that the rampant blindness is not a pandemic at all but just an unfortunate coincidence.