BEAUTIFUL RUINS by Jess Walter

This is one of the few books where I think the author was justified in telling the story non-sequentially.  The plot bounces back and forth between present-day California and the Ligurian Coast of Italy in 1962.  In the earlier time slice, Pasquale owns a small hotel in a village called Porto Vergogna (port of shame)—not to be confused with Portovenere in the famed Cinque Terre.  Suddenly one day a beautiful young actress, Dee Moray, arrives, stealing Pasquale's heart.  Dee has a small part in the movie Cleopatra, and Pasquale feels that she is out of his league, romantically speaking, so that their connection is more wistful than passionate.  Plus, Pasquale has obligations of his own to fulfill.  Fast forward to the present, and a young woman named Claire is struggling with career decisions and love-life decisions, when a young man named Shane comes into the studio where she works to pitch a movie idea.  He has to take a backseat, though, to Pasquale, now an old man, who has come to try to reconnect with Dee Moray.  If this all sounds a little too saccharine, then consider the two other characters who inadvertently orchestrate the plot.  Michael Deane is a self-absorbed Hollywood bigshot who serves as the publicity chief for Cleopatra and ousts Dee from the movie with a cruel lie of epic proportions.  Richard Burton, larger than life, is the cad we expect him to be, stealing Dee's heart, even as he woos Elizabeth Taylor away from Eddie Fisher.  Burton's role in this novel is little more than a cameo, but his impact on the lives of the other characters is immeasurable.  I loved the idea of this novel more than the novel itself.  It was just a little too dreamy for my tastes, with characters that I didn't bond with closely enough, and a plot that didn't grab my attention quite tightly enough.  The calmness that pervades this book makes it a good one to relax with.  Even the book's moments of strife, such as when Dee's son has to live penniless on the streets of Edinburgh, never seem too scary, as I just assumed everything would turn out OK in the end.

CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY by Alan Paton

The most surprising thing about this book is that Paton wrote it in 1946.  The language is a little odd but somehow intoned the voice of an African speaker.  The two main characters are a black clergyman and a white landowner, James Jarvis, both of whom live in a small fictional village in South Africa.  The black man, Stephen Kumalo, gets word that his sister in Johannesburg is ill.  He travels there and finds that she is not physically sick but has fallen into an unhealthy lifestyle, especially for her young son.  Kumalo then begins a circuitous search for his own son, Absalom, and comes to suspect that Absalom has killed Jarvis's son Arthur, who interrupted a home invasion.  Arthur's activism for the abolition of apartheid makes his murder by a black man all the more poignant, as the "natives" have now lost an advocate and a friend. The two fathers are to some degree a microcosm of the country itself, peeling back the layers of the urban dysfunction, as their respective sons' activities come to light.  The recurring theme in this book is fear, and certainly ignorance begets fear.  The author makes a strong case for education as one of the many bricks needed to build equality and unity among the diverse populations.  One of my favorite passages is from a book that Arthur Jarvis was writing before his death:  "It was permissible to use unskilled men for unskilled work.  But it is not permissible to keep men unskilled for the sake of unskilled work."  Arthur had great admiration for Abraham Lincoln, and in another passage, he observes, "We believe in help for the underdog, but we want him to stay under."  What's ironic about South Africa, vs. the U.S. for example, is that the whites exploited a population that vastly outnumbered them.  Somehow the fear factor is much more apparent when I consider this situation in which the whites had every reason to be nervous.  How can the few subjugate the many without repercussions?

GIRL IN TRANSLATION by Jean Kwok

Kimberly Chang was the smartest student in her class in Hong Kong, but in Brooklyn, her language difficulties are a limiting factor.  Then after school she works with her mother in a sweatshop owned by her mother's haughty sister, Paula.  Aunt Paula also sets Kimberly and her mother up in an apartment, but it's a ramshackle, roach-infested dump with no heat.  The upside of working in the factory is that Kimberly meets Matt, who is also helping his mother meet production quotas.  Eventually, Kimberly proves herself a scholar in math and science and earns an opportunity to attend Harrison, an expensive prep school.  She juggles school and work and keeping all of her classmates, including her best friend Annette, in the dark about how destitute she and her mother are.  Achieving so much with so few resources is quite a feat, but her life as a normal teenager suffers, even though her aloofness is actually a turn-on for some of the boys at school.  We know from the start that either her future as a surgeon or her relationship with Matt is doomed, because he will never allow her to be the breadwinner.  I happily and quickly traipsed through this book, despite the fact that I found the storyline to be a bit tired and predictable:  A smart immigrant girl claws her way up from abject poverty and has to choose between a bright future and love for a boy from her old world.  Also, the characters are a bit one-dimensional—Kimberly is wonderful, although she does trip up occasionally, Annette is her ever-supportive sidekick, and Aunt Paula is basically a wicked witch.

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS by John Green

Here's a young adult novel about 3 teenagers with cancer, two of whom fall in love.  This premise may sound particularly unappealing, but think again.  Yes, it's a little weepy, but there's way more to it than that.  Our narrator is 16-year-old Hazel, who has terminal thyroid cancer that has spread to her lungs, forcing her to tote an oxygen cart around with her everywhere.  Augustus is her 17-year-old love interest, who has a type of cancer that most people survive, but he has already lost a leg to it.  Finally, there's Isaac, who brings the other two together at a support group meeting.  The author handles all this with such a deft hand and with such witty and intelligent dialog that I didn't even mind very much when he rather predictably turned the tables on us.  He never lets us forget that these characters have cancer, while at the same time making us love them for who they are—typical teenagers in many ways but wise beyond their years because they have to look at the world from a perspective that most of us don't have to experience.  The back story is Hazel's favorite book, a novel called An Imperial Affliction, also about a young person with cancer, that ends in the middle of a sentence.  She and Augustus manage to gain an audience with the author in Amsterdam in the hope that he will enlighten them as to what eventually happens to the characters in the book.  The big question, though, is this:  What's the point of loving someone who is about to die?  Given that death is inevitable and often unpredictable, we have to cherish every moment with those we love, and the author makes this point quite eloquently, without heavy-handedness.  He imbues his characters with a gentle thoughtfulness that draws our admiration and our compassion.

NIGHT FILM by Marisha Pessl

I was so excited to begin reading this book, and that enthusiasm lasted about halfway through.  Then the book began to drag—on and on and on.  Also, this madcap mystery bears a striking resemblance to The Cuckoo's Calling, with about the same degree of absurdity.  Here the narrator is a journalist, Scott McGrath, who attracts a couple of hangers-on:  Nora—a coatcheck girl who was the last person to see Ashley alive—and Hopper, whom Scott encounters at the scene of Ashley's suicide.  Ashley was a former piano prodigy and the daughter of Stanislas Cordova, a film-noir director, whom Scott famously accused of criminal behavior years ago.  Scott wants to vindicate himself and recover his reputation by finding Cordova somehow responsible for Ashley's death.  Hopper has his own reasons for joining this quest, and I never figured out what Nora's motives were.  Scott has a diabolical sort of Alice in Wonderland adventure that may have actually happened and may have involved a significant amount of black magic, or may have been a wild hallucination.  One symbol that runs throughout the novel is that of "a tapeworm that's eaten its own tail."  Scott's pursuit of the truth here certainly falls into the category of a trail that seems to circle back on itself.  He meets lots of wacky characters (as did the afore-mentioned Alice) who lead him on the proverbial wild goose chase and then vanish into thin air.  The writing is impeccable ("It was a clear winter day with all the bounce and bright-eyed resilience of a teenager…, the two-day-old snow crunching like cake icing under our boots."); it's just not enough.

ONCE WE WERE BROTHERS by Ronald H. Balson

I was reluctant to read this book, but several people told me they loved it, so I borrowed a copy and dove in.  I found the storytelling to be decent, but the other facets of the book dragged it down so much that I have to disagree with all those proponents.  The dialog is stilted, and the character development is non-existent.  Catherine is an overworked attorney whose friend Liam, a private investigator, introduces her to Ben, a Polish Holocaust survivor.  Ben is convinced that a prominent Chicago philanthropist is a former Nazi who absconded with his family's treasures, including a sizeable amount of cash.  (I didn't understand why this Jewish family didn't keep a large chunk of their cash for escape purposes; if they were giving their valuables to someone for safekeeping, then surely they suspected that they might have to flee.)  Catherine becomes somewhat of a broken record as she incessantly laments the billable hours that she sacrifices in order to hear Ben's story.  (The lady doth protest too much.)  Eventually, of course, she buys into his story so completely that she's willing to risk everything in order to help him obtain retribution.  I, on the other hand, just did not warm up to him and never felt as moved by Ben's story as Catherine was.  In fact, Ben got on my nerves with his refusal to cut to the chase.  Plus, some of the things he did to help rescue his family back in the 1940s, such as impersonating a Nazi officer, seemed a bit far-fetched.  That episode is not really any more preposterous, though, than the fact that an attorney would spend hours of office time listening to an old man's story. 

A LAND MORE KIND THAN HOME by Wiley Cash

Here's another novel about Southerners behaving badly.  Yes, I know, this is about a rural community, and obviously this kind of thing really happens, but the Pentecostals are even starting to give up speaking in tongues.  This book is set 30 years ago, I think, but still….  We have 3 first-person narrators (very Faulkneresque):  Jess (a 9-year-old boy that, once again, I initially thought was a girl), Adelaide (an elderly woman), and Clem (the sheriff).  Just the fact that the sheriff is one of the narrators does not portend well for this community.  The villain is Carson Chambliss, pastor of a small church where snake-handling is the norm.  One elderly woman has already died due to this practice, but the so-called Christian parishioners dumped her body in her backyard so that there would be no suspicions surrounding the church.  Adelaide now keeps all the children at her house during the services to protect them from the caged rattlers.  Jess peeks in a church window one Sunday and observes church members trying to cure his older brother Stump of muteness by laying on hands, which is not as gentle a process as one might think.  All in all, Chambliss is one of the scariest religious fanatics ever, and he's having an affair with Jess's mother.  There must be some charisma there, but that didn't come across to me.  In fact, I like for my characters to be a little more nuanced, but he is bad to the bone.  When Jess inadvertently causes the zealots to believe that a miracle has occurred, the consequences are dire.  Jess's paternal grandfather, whom the sheriff blames for his son's death, reenters the picture as a somewhat reformed man.  This book did not teach me anything, nor did it move me or entertain me all that much, but it inspired a pretty lively book club discussion.