CLOUD CUCKOO LAND by Anthony Doerr

Five disparate storylines have at least one thread in common—their connection to an ancient Greek text.  Four of the storylines focus on resourceful adolescents, and all five narratives are so distinctive that keeping track of who’s who is not an issue.  Omeir and Anna are on opposite sides of the siege of Constantinople in the fifteenth century; Konstance is rocketing toward another planet in the future; and Seymour, on the autism spectrum, becomes extremely distressed by the destruction of wildlife habitats.  The fifth storyline follows the life of Zeno, a Korean war veteran, who is rehearsing a dramatic production of the aforementioned Greek story in the local library with five children.  Seymour’s and Zeno’s lives intersect early in the novel when Seymour enters the library with the goal of bombing the real estate office nextdoor.  All of the characters except Seymour have to dig deep within themselves in an effort to survive life-threatening situations alone.  For me, Konstance’s story stands out, because she has to call upon her intellect as well as her inner strength to battle isolation and uncertainty.  I find, though, that in most books in which there are several threads in progress that I gravitate to one in particular and tend to focus less on the other storylines that are competing for my attention.  However, here I would rate Omeir’s narrative a close second, as his suffering is the most heartbreaking as well as the most vivid.  I’m sure the author is promoting a theme in this book, and the best conclusion I’ve reached is that he is pitting the individuals who are striving for preservation of the environment and of knowledge against the hordes that seem bent on destruction.  Seymour is the character with a foot in each camp, viewing destruction as a means of preservation, but his vision of the outcome is flawed and unfortunately influenced by entities who do not necessarily share his objective.  Thanks to Simon and Schuster for the advance reading copy.

THE TESTAMENTS by Margaret Atwood

I have not watched any episodes of the TV series based on Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but apparently in this book she makes an effort not to contradict the TV series.  This novel takes place around fifteen years later, and Gilead, the fascist misogynist country that occupies most of the U.S., is still thriving, but the three narrators of this novel may be able to widen some cracks in the regime.  Two teenagers, Agnes in Gilead and Daisy in Canada, both eventually discover that their parents who raised them are not their biological parents.  The third narrator, who is recording her thoughts surreptitiously, is the powerful Aunt Lydia, who has apparently become, or was always, disillusioned, with Gilead’s treatment of women.  I actually liked the format of this book, but I don’t think it’s one of Atwood’s best.  There is not enough suspense and perhaps even too much optimism about the fate of Gilead.  I also found the characters to be a little thin until near the end when Daisy, later known as Jade, shows more grit than I really expected of her.  Agnes, too, has a moment of gumption when confronted with the prospect of marrying a man old enough to be her grandfather.  Although Lydia knows both what came before Gilead, and how much she has lost, and what life there is like now, the two teenagers know only their own separate and wildly distinctive worlds.  Each finds herself in a situation in which she has to survive on the unfamiliar turf of the other’s environment, and I found their adaptations to be the most revealing in terms of who they are and what they are capable of.

HAG-SEED by Margaret Atwood

I love most of Margaret Atwood’s stuff, but this book is a little too offbeat for me.  Felix is a theatre festival director whose renderings of Shakespeare’s plays have become increasingly more outlandish.  He finds himself abruptly out of a job when his acolyte, Tony, who has been usurping his power a little at a time, boots him out, before Felix’s latest project, The Tempest, comes to fruition.  Felix then becomes a slightly deranged recluse in an out-of-the-way shack for a dozen years, imagining that his dead daughter lives with him.  Opportunity knocks with an offer to teach literacy at a medium security prison.  Felix accepts, with the caveat that he will teach Shakespeare and direct the inmates in a different play every year, and Felix’s kooky production style is well-suited for enactment by his incarcerated players.  Then another improbable opportunity arises when Tony and friends plan to abolish the prison literacy program, not knowing that Felix is at the helm.  They plan a visit to the prison, and Felix stages an immersive production of The Tempest during their visit in order to exact the revenge he has been wanting for years.  This is where things go a little haywire with regard to believability.  Granted, this novel parallels The Tempest, which is full of spells and spirits, but convincing inmates to drug visiting dignitaries is far-fetched, to say the least.  For me, a book this wacky is not in Atwood’s wheelhouse.

MADDADDAM by Margaret Atwood

I have to confess that I barely remember anything about the first two books in this series—Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.  No matter.  Toby and Zeb and a few others are survivors of the plague brought on by Crake in his effort to wipe out humanity and replace our species with genetically engineered beings, the Children of Crake, or Crakers, who are completely innocent and devoid of malice.  They munch on kudzu and have no use for clothing, or what they perceive as a second skin.  We learn Zeb’s story, as he tells it to Toby, his lover and a sort of medicine woman. Toby is the central character here who finds herself the appointed storyteller for humoring the Crakers, who jump to unexpected conclusions.  Toby manufactures bigger and bigger whoppers, sometimes just to avoid having to explain something like the “f” word.  Zeb’s history is fodder for some of these stories, but they need no embellishment.  His escapades are the stuff of James Bond novels—wild, crazy, daring, and sometimes violent.  Oh, and he describes himself as a babe magnet.  What’s not to love?  And, for me, this is ultimately a love story, even though this book is the conclusion of a trilogy about rebooting civilization.  When Toby introduces the Crakers to reading and writing, we can see how she is jumpstarting their society to more advanced methods of keeping track of their own history, even though their perceptions of it are extremely skewed.

THE ROBBER BRIDE by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood has created some diabolical characters, and Zenia in this novel is one of her best.  She appears in a restaurant where three of her friends—Roz, Charys, and Tony--are having lunch—five years after they have buried what was supposed to be a canister of her ashes.  The stories of the three bewildered friends follow this astonishing sighting, and we find that Zenia is a supreme manipulator and maneater.  Each friend in turn has befriended Zenia, comforted her, loaned her money, taken her in, nursed her back to emotional or physical health and then been blindsided when Zenia runs off with the woman’s lover or husband.  Zenia is basically toying with these men, as she summarily dumps them when their purpose has been served.  I never quite got a sense for Zenia’s motives, however.  Was she punishing the women for having something she did not?  Or was she just stealing these men to prove how weak the men were and how gullible their women were?  In some ways, this novel is a juicy romp, as each of Zenia’s moves and lies is more outlandish than the last, and I wanted to pull my hair out when all three women are duped by her tales of woe, allowing Zenia to upend their lives.  They all admire her, then feel sorry for her, and ultimately want revenge.  As I read this novel, I couldn’t help thinking how much fun it must have been to write such a blatantly evil character as Zenia and to cast three strong women as her unwitting victims who finally have a second chance to claim the upper hand.

THE RED LOTUS by Chris Bohjalian

I don’t think of Chris Bohjalian as a thriller writer, but he has concocted a doozy here; it has more in common with The Flight Attendant than it does with most of his other work.  Alexis, an ER physician, and Austin, her boyfriend of less than a year, are near the end of their bike tour vacation in Vietnam when Austin disappears.  Unsure of exactly how serious their relationship is, Alexis tries not to overreact.  She soon discovers that Austin has not been entirely truthful about why he wanted to come back to Vietnam after having just traveled there within the past year.  The two met when Alexis treated Austin for a gunshot wound.  He works in the same hospital in fund raising but may be involved in something more nefarious.  His explanation of how he was shot and how he got the scratches on his hands sound fishy, and we can fault Alexis for being naïve, but otherwise Austin hasn’t really given her cause to be suspicious.  The villain here, Douglas Webber, is evil in a completely unsubtle way, and Bohjalian doesn’t pull any punches when describing the horrors of napalm and Agent Orange that the Americans showered on the Vietnamese and their landscape.  And frankly, things become more gruesome as the plot thickens.  Besides the great writing and never-ending suspense, one thing I liked about this book is how the author never really pigeonholes Austin as a good guy or a villain.  Alexis, who has had some self-mutilation problems in the past, can’t help but doubt her own judgment when she gradually uncovers Austin’s secrets that do not reflect positively on his character.  I would be remiss to ignore the very uncomfortable and prophetic ending, which conjures up an image that I can’t unsee.

SKELETONS AT THE FEAST by Chris Bohjalian

Here’s yet another WWII novel, but this one is set near the end of the war.  Germans are fleeing the eastern part of the country in order to escape the Russian army, who are known to torture and murder civilians.  German families have a much better chance of staying alive by moving westward into the hands of the Americans and Brits.  The family whose story dominates this novel consists mainly of a mother, who adored Hitler, and her two children—18-year-old Anna and 10-year-old Theo.  They are also harboring Callum, a Scottish paratrooper and POW who has been working on the family’s farm, in the hopes that he will vouch for him when they reach the troops in the west.  More importantly, he is Anna’s secret lover.  This novel also follows the death march of Cecile, a young Frenchwoman, and the journey of Uri, a young Jewish man who jumps from a cattle car full of Jews bound for Auschwitz.  Uri is definitely the most colorful character, as he joins the family’s trek but conceals his true identity.  He has become a chameleon, confiscating whatever corpse’s uniform will afford him the best opportunity to survive.  This novel moves at a much brisker pace than the journey of its characters, and that’s a big plus, as the storyline never lingers too long over tragedies.  The author emphasizes that the German people were in denial not only about what was happening to the Jews but also about the danger posed by the Russians’ relentless and merciless advancement.  The parallel between their failure to recognize their own peril and Jews who pointlessly packed luggage before boarding a train to a concentration camp is striking.

WHAT COULD BE SAVED by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

Philip Preston went missing in Thailand when he was eight years old.  Now, 40 years later, his sister Laura receives a convincing email that indicates Philip is alive and still in Thailand.  Against the advice of her boyfriend and her sister Bea, Laura jumps on a plane to Bangkok so that she can confirm Philip’s identity and retrieve him.  What’s so nifty about this semi-obscure novel is that it keeps the reader in suspense for a long time about what really happened to Philip.  I have to say that I was torn between wanting to hear Philip’s story and not wanting this book to end.  His story is just as grim as we may have imagined, but who is ultimately responsible for his disappearance is as disturbing as it is shocking.  In fact, we find out near the end that an unfortunate confluence of events led to Philip’s misfortune.  In many ways this book is a de rigueur family saga with the usual jaw-dropping secrets about cowardice and betrayal.  However, the author whips these elements into a delicious novel against an exotic backdrop.  During the family’s time as expats living in Thailand as the Vietnam War was winding down, Philip’s mother was not even aware that her husband was doing intelligence work for the U.S.  This is one of those books in which almost everything that happens is critical to the plot.  One incident in which Philip gets into a fight at his judo class left me a little puzzled as to what its significance was, but the author ties everything else up pretty neatly at the end.  I did have to reread one early scene at Philip’s father’s office, and I am still not entirely sure that I understand what happened there.  Sometimes we just have to draw our own conclusions and be OK with that.

THE WOMEN by T.C. Boyle

As in The Inner Circle, the narrator of this book is a fictional character—one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentices who really did mostly grunt work around the Taliesin estate.  However, this piece of historical fiction is not so much about the great American architect as it is about his lover Mamah, whom he called his soul mate, and two of his wives—Miriam and Olgivanna.  Boyle, who lives in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, tells their stories in reverse order, and I liked this format.  In this way I got to know Olgivanna while Miriam was still in the picture, then Miriam while Wright was still mourning Mamah’s tragic death, and finally Mamah.  I think Boyle told Mamah’s story last, because hers is the most poignant, and her death is certainly a defining moment for Wright.  Wright’s first wife, Kitty, is in the background for all of these stories, but she is not really the villain.  That role falls to Miriam, a closet drug addict who made Frank and Olgivanna’s life a living hell.  She didn’t want to divorce him, but she didn’t want to live with him, either.  She excelled at creating drama and mayhem, mostly with a stroke of her pen.  Frank himself seemed to drift from one scandal to another, while dodging bankruptcy and establishing his well-founded reputation as a genius in his field.  This book is rather long but rarely drags, with Boyle at the helm.  However, I did not like the myriad footnotes constantly disrupting the flow.  I often missed the asterisk indicator but then read the footnote when I finished the page and had to skim the page again to find the passage that warranted the footnote.  I read a hardback copy, and I can’t imagine how the electronic version handled the footnotes.  Some of the best anecdotes are in the footnotes, though, including one where Wright declares himself the world’s greatest architect during a court proceeding.  Another footnote reminds us that one of Wright’s sons invented Lincoln Logs.  If you skip over the footnotes, you will be missing out on some good stuff.