Lisa Tucker: The Winters in Bloom

978-1416575405 – Atria – Hardcover – $24.00 (ebook editions available)

From the author’s website describing The Winters in Bloom:
Together for over a decade, Kyra and David Winter are happier than they ever thought they could be.  They have a comfortable home, stable careers, and a young son, Michael, whom they adore.  Yet because of their complicated histories, Kyra and David have always feared that this domestic bliss couldn’t last – that the life they created was destined to be disrupted.  And on one perfectly ordinary summer day, it is: Michael disappears from his own backyard.  The only question is whose past has finally caught up with them. David feels sure that Michael was taken by his troubled ex-wife, while Kyra believes the kidnapper must be someone from her estranged family, someone she betrayed years ago.

As the Winters embark on a journey of time and memory to find Michael, they will be forced to admit these suspicions, revealing secrets about themselves they’ve always kept hidden.  But they will also have a chance to discover that it’s not too late to have the family they’ve dreamed of; that even if the world is full of risks, as long as they have hope, the future can bloom.

The Winters in Bloom is the first book I have read by Lisa Tucker, whose books are about families and relationships.  I wasn’t sure when I started it whether I was going to finish, I was worried that it was going to be formulaic and predictable, and especially at the outset of the novel, where the two parent characters are introduced, I was very nervous about where this book might go and whether I could stay with it.

It turned out that I could not put it down.  It is full of surprises, deeply felt, complicated in ways that are better left for the reader to discover for her or himself.  I ended up of course, loving the book, and looking forward to talking with Lisa about her characters and her writing.  And did I say, she is a terrific writer?

As with the title itself, which has a subtle ambiguity, this novel will offer readers depth and a kind of thoughtfulness about what a family can and should be, that runs counter to our initial expectations for it.  I really liked being surprised by this book.  Lisa also gives a great interview and I think you will enjoy hearing our conversation about her book.

I really liked this quote about the book too:

“Brilliant, tender, and  riveting. . . Reading The Winters in Bloom is like falling into some beguiling dream,  one you don’t want to wake from. There is a fascinating strangeness at work here, an off-kilter logic that keeps you enrapt and breathless. This is what can happen to people like us when the past comes calling. Lisa Tucker has not  described a world; she has created one unlike any you’ve never seen. She has breathed life into her characters, and they will breathe life into you.”
— John Dufresne, author of Requiem, Mass

Lisa Tucker’s website is worth a visit also.

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Amor Towles: Rules of Civility

978-0670022694 – Viking – Hardcover – $26.95 (ebook and audiobook versions also available)

Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility has become my favorite books.  This WritersCast interview series has allowed me to read some incredibly good books this year; Amor Towles’ story of New York City in 1938 has risen to the top of my list of novels I fell in love with.

Rules of Civility opens with the book’s heroine, older, successful, married, with her husband viewing the famous mid-sixties Museum of Modern Art showing of Walker Evans’ 1938 New York City subway photographs. She and her husband see and talk about two particular photographs – a man she knew in 1938 and who mattered hugely to her life and helped shape the arc of her entire life.  Then the real story begins, as flashback to that high intensity period of her life, when by accident, she began the process of becoming the person we meet at the opening of the book.

It’s a great way to start a book.  Reminding us of just how much a role chance and happenstance – and what we make of it – means to our lives.  Author Towles loves the way opportunity winds around us, especially it seems at the fraught time in our lives when we are setting out in the world to define ourselves, when we make the choices that define our lives, sometimes purely accidental, sometimes with just an inkling that these choices will have monumental effects.

There is a wonderful story here.  Our heroine, Katey (who grew up as Katya, an immigrant’s daughter), is living in Manhattan.  It’s 1938, still Depression era America, but just on the cusp of its ending.  New York is both gritty and glitzy at the same time.  Katey is working as a legal assistant, going out at night with her limited funds and her few friends.

One night, she and her best friend meet a man who will thrust Katey into a new life, where she meets the smart set of society, and gains the confidence to become a modern, successful woman, in many ways mirroring the American story arc of the same period.

Towles is a terrific writer, and I found myself reading some passages aloud to revel in the beauty of his sentences.  He brings New York in 1938 to life, reminding us how close we actually are to what is now almost a forgotten period of our history.  The book made me want to see again some of the great movies of this era, all of which shared the ironic understanding of modern culture this book displays.  I’m quite certain Towles has seen them all and internalized their values.

You need to read this story for yourself – it’s complicated and has an utterly rewarding denouement.  Suffice to say, Katey learns a great deal about the people she meets, loves some, despises others, and absorbs what she learns on the way to becoming herself.  This one year is the pivot point for her entire life, and the sense we get from the story is that New York has engendered the same for millions who came there for a very long time, though probably for many less self-aware than Katey and her author, Amor Towles.    Here’s one of the great lines from the book that in some ways encapsulates the story it tells: “from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise — that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.”  Perfect.

This is Amor Towles’ first published novel.  In our discussion, we talked about how he was able to write it, despite having a full time job and a family.  And we talked about the story of the novel, and its characters, and about New York in the 1930s, a great and somewhat neglected period for fiction.  It’s a great book and I hope an equally rewarding conversation for listeners.

Amor Towles website is worth a visit.  And you also might enjoy George Washington’s Rules of Civility (& Decent Behaviour In Company and Conversation) which plays a critical role in this novel. And a nonfiction piece he wrote called What I learned from Cole Porter on Oprah.com.

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Karl Marlantes: What It Is Like to Go to War

978-0802119926 – Atlantic Monthly Press – Hardcover – $25.00 (e-book and audiobook editions available)

I read Karl Marlantes’ novel, the extraordinary Matterhorn last year (and interviewed him about it for Writerscast – you can listen to that interview here).  I don’t think I am alone in believing that Matterhorn is perhaps the finest and most important war novel of the Vietnam generation; for me at least, it belongs in the pantheon of great American war novels (going back to WWI, Thomas Boyd’s Through the Wheat is another great novel written by an former Marine).

It took Karl Marlantes more than 30 years to write and publish the novel we read as Matterhorn its final form.  His new book, What It Is like to Go to War, now follows as a deeply thoughtful and moving work of nonfiction about the nature and meaning of war, and what it means to the individual warriors who participate who fight, as well as to the society that gives them that responsibility.

There are many parallels between the two books.  I’d recommend you take on the novel first, spend some time thinking about its story and characters, and then move on to this new work of nonfiction, which is a combination of personal memoir, meditation and social, political and cultural analysis and polemic.

Insofar as fiction gives us our deepest emotional and spiritual truths, Matterhorn cannot fail to move you and allow you to feel the reality  of what it is like when our best and brightest go to war.  Then What It Is Like to Go to War gives us another carefully wrought perspective, what Marlantes has learned from his own experiences and from many years of studying and thinking about war and society.

And we should all be paying attention to what he says here.  America has had more people fighting wars for a longer period of time than at any other time in our history.  Indeed what does this say about contemporary American society?

In 1969, when he was just 23, Karl Marlantes was an inexperienced lieutenant in charge of a platoon of Marines whose lives were in his hands.  His experiences in the jungles of Vietnam , molded and shaped him throughout his life.  He has thought deeply about his wartime experiences, how they affected him and his comrades, as well as how other soldiers before and since have gone through similar experiences.  In What It Is Like to Go to War, Marlantes weaves accounts of his own combat experiences with analysis, self-examination, and powerful ideas drawn from his wide reading from Homer to the Mahabharata to Jung.

Unlike many of us who feel that war must be ended in modern society, Marlantes starts from the belief that war is an inevitable component of societal and political being.  What he is after is to make us think about preparing warriors not for fighting, which we already do quite well, but for living with the effects on those who go to war that derive from participating in the morally unnatural but societally sanctioned acts of killing other human beings.

Most societies that preceded us have used powerful rituals, myths and ceremonies to integrate acts of war into the fabric of their cultures, and to reintegrate their warriors thoroughly into their societies, while our secular, materialist society really offers no tools or methods to warriors (or for that matter to civilians) to create a holistic “story” of why and how war is meaningful and necessary.

One of the many points he made in this book really struck me is that those who send men and women to war are themselves warriors, that actual soldiers (as opposed to guns and bombs) are their weapons.  These individuals must fully comprehend what they do, and must find ways to integrate their own acts of war as much as the soldiers on the battlefield who wield the weapons and who witness so much death and destruction on both sides of battle.

I found that the author’s afterword to the book was very important to my understanding and acceptance of his work:

“We must be honest and open about both sides of war.  The more aware we are of war’s costs, not just in death and dollars, but also in shattered minds, souls, and families, the less likely we will be to waste our most precious asset and our best weapon: our young.”

“The substitutes for war…are spirituality, love, art, and creativity, all achievable through individual hard work.”

I can’t recommend this book to readers enough.  It’s book that, like the work of my friend, Paul Chappell, (Will War Ever End and The End of War) has the potential to shift our societal dialogue about war and what it can and should mean to a modern society.

There’s a fine review of What It Means to Go to War in the NY Times and a very worthwhile interview with Karl on Livewriters about Matterhorn.

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M.J. Rose: The Hypnotist

978-0778329206 – Mira Books – paperback – $14.95 (e-book and audio book editions available)

M.J. Rose is a critically acclaimed novelist – she’s best known for her thrillers, of which The Hypnotist is one.  It’s in a series with The Reincarnationist and The Memorist, all them with reincarnation as a central theme.  MJ’s characters are compelling and well drawn, and her stories are complex and original, the books are fun to read and impossible to put down.  What more could you ask of a novel?

M.J. is also well known among writers for her activism in behalf of writers, and her brilliant understanding of marketing.  But that’s a different conversation than the one we had about The Hypnotist, a book I deeply enjoyed reading, for me perfect as I got to read the book on vacation, and it is way better than most books we think of as “beach reads.”  As one reviewer said: The Hypnotist has “something for everyone: murder, suspense, history, romance, the supernatural, mystery and erotica.”

The detective Lucian Glass becomes deeply involved in the pursuit of anti-hero Malachai Samuels, whose Phoenix Foundation is committed to the study of reincarnation (at almost any cost).  Glass is a tortured soul whose own life connects him to the present and past day lives of other characters in this novel.  It’s a complexly drawn story and one that will reward readers, even those who have no interest in the paranormal or esoteric metaphysical subjects that are do beautifully woven through the story. You will enjoy the denouement, and the story will stay with you long after you have turned the last page of the book.

Rose is a skillful writer who treats her readers to a high level of originality and surprising story making.  She is also fun and rewarding to talk to about her books, as she shows in this insightful interview.  She has a great website, a couple of blogs, and aside from having written 11 works of fiction, she has also co-authored two books about writing, and has been profiled in Time Magazine, Forbes, The New York Times, Business 2.0, Working Woman, Newsweek and New York Magazine, and has been on many television shows.  She is also the founder of the very successful book promotion business, AuthorBuzz.

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Dean Bakopoulos: My American Unhappiness

978-0151013449 – Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – Hardcover – $24.00 – ebook editions available

Dean Bakopoulos is a very funny and perceptive writer.  My American Unhappiness, his second novel, takes place in Madison, Wisconsin during the period of the second Bush administration.  Both the geographical and political backdrops are crucial elements of the story, whose main character is Zeke Pappas, a nebbish who runs a nonprofit called the Great Midwestern Humanities Initiative.

Zeke is an obsessive of some great measure.  His life work has become the creation and maintenance of an “inventory of American Unhappiness,” a project that is a “byproduct of an overly cerebral loneliness.” He is also wildly naive and unrealistic, characteristics which in a certain way serve him well, as he is surrounded with problems in his life that would defeat the average person in short order.

Bakopoulos brilliantly balances the personal difficulties faced by Zeke with his involvement with some of the darker elements of the Bush era, including corrupt conservative politicians hiding the kind of personal behavior they legislate against in public, and the disconcerting pursuit of Zeke by a dark security-oriented governmental agency established after 9/11.

In some ways, the book could be read as just a zany midwestern comedy, but it’s clear that with Zeke Pappas’s story, Bakopoulos wants to tell us something important about 21st century American society.  Zeke’s world is falling apart.  His mother develops cancer, and decides to give her orphaned grandchildren (whom Zeke loves) to an aunt, unless Zeke can marry in time (impossible for him as he is simply too unrealistic about women).   The government wants to audit the nonprofit he runs.  Nothing works for Zeke.  It’s a situation he feels he shares with the country as a whole, and Zeke knows it is the President that is the source of American unhappiness and ennui.  Zeke sees Bush as “unencumbered by something as pervasive as unhappiness,” which makes him unfit to lead a country as complex and haunted as America.  For Zeke Bush does not have the depth of spirit required to lead the nation.

Dean Bakopoulos is a writer to watch, a writer with great skills and who does have the depth of spirit required to portray the American scene through fiction.  He is also a terrific writer to talk to about his work and gave me a great interview.  You can visit his website to learn more about his work and ideas. I am definitely looking forward to reading his next book.

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Katharine Weber: The Memory of All That

978-0307395887 – Crown – Hardcover – $24.00 – ebook editions also available

Katharine Weber is best known as a novelist – I interviewed her last year about her wonderful novel True Confections and she has written many more fine books.  The Memory of All That, subtitled “George Gershwin, Kay Swift and My Family’s Legacy of Infidelities is both a memoir of her own family, as well as a history of a certain slice of twentieth century America, primarily focused on her grandmother, Kay Swift, whom she loved, and her quite unusual and difficult father, Sidney Kaufman, with whom her relationship was far more complicated to say the least.

Sidney Kaufman was a larger than life character, but mainly one of his own making, someone who spent years trying to “make it” in the movies and never succeeding.  He was also a narcissist, a husband who literally neglected his wife and family, and who had numerous long lasting affairs.  One most notable was an affair that lasted for years with Beatrice Buchman, wife of the famed (blacklisted) screenwriter, Sidney Buchman (who happens to be my father’s first cousin).

Sidney Kaufman also was a target of a decades long investigation by the FBI, initially because the agency confused him with another Sidney Kaufman, a longshoreman who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight fascism in Spain.  And hilariously, Kaufman was such a fantasist, that the FBI itself could not tell the facts about his life from the fiction.  Not so hilariously was the effect of Kaufman’s absences and failures to relate to his family, which deeply affected the author of this book, as she recounts in some deeply moving passages in this book.

But in many ways, the focus of this book is really on Kay Swift, known even today for her wonderful music, as well as for her lengthy romance (and musical collaboration) with renowned composer George Gershwin.  Weber tells her grandmother’s fascinating life story with a great deal of love, and of course intimacy, and provides an insider’s view of many details of her life and relationships with her husbands and lovers.  Swift is in many ways an iconic, 20th century American woman, who made her way among men at a time when doing so was unusual and difficult, and required considerable verve and inner direction.  And while she had many material advantages, the challenges she faced and overcame, both personally and professionally, were significant and testament to her powerful inner being.

Weber’s grandfather was James Paul Warburg, and here introduces us to him and the rest of his famous banking family.  Interesting stories are here in abundance.  Grandfather Warburg advised and feuded with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, great-uncle Aby Warburg, while eccentric to say the least, was responsible for significant theories in art and myth, and the family was at times dominated by the unusual psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg (who slept with his patients on a regular basis, and turned George Gershwin against Kay Swift when she decided to stop allowing him to sleep with her!)

Overall, this is an engaging, beautifully written and emotionally powerful book.  Katharine Weber’s family has been complicated, brilliant, interesting, and influential in many areas of American life, and of course has made her the writer she is today.  She tells the story of her family with humor, love and a keen eye for emotional detail, and gives us a portrait of herself at the same time.

In my conversation with Katharine we talked about her father, and the complexities of his life, as well as her relationship with Kay Swift and how this book came to be written.  It’s a terrifically engaging story she has to tell and we had a great talk about her really great book.

Katharine Weber’s website is here.  The Memory of All That got a terrific review in the NY Times:

“…Ms. Weber’s account of her relationship with her manipulative fabulist of a father brings to mind classic autobiographies of unmoored childhoods, like Mary Karr’s “Liars’ Club” and those companion volumes from the brothers Wolff, “This Boy’s Life” (Tobias) and “The Duke of Deception” (Geoffrey)…It’s when Ms. Weber remembers Papa that her considerable skills as a writer are most seductively on display. And it’s not just because the exasperating Kaufman is such a good subject. It’s that Ms. Weber is able to arrange words musically, so that they capture the elusive, unfinished melodies that haunt our memories of childhood. As her grandmother’s lover might have put it, she’s got rhythm.” – Ben Brantley

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Scott Gummer: Parents Behaving Badly

978-1451609172 – Simon & Schuster Touchstone – hardcover – $23.00 (ebook versions available)

Scott Gummer’s Parents Behaving Badly appealed to me right away – a novel about Little League, what more fun could you want?  Baseball is one of my greatest passions and having been a Little League parent and coach, I was looking forward to reading a novel set in this rich environment that so full of potential for conflict and frustration, as well as great joy.

In any kid sports environment, you have parents’ overwrought desires and expectations, the fraught interactions of coaches and parents, and the difference in outlook between any given 10 year old and any parent is especially fertile ground.  And don’t forget the potential for unexpected romance among the suburban parental set.

Reading Parents Behaving Badly, which is, by the way, laugh out loud funny, did not disappoint in any way.   Gummer is funny and extremely perceptive, and what really makes the novel work is that he tells a good story, writes believable characters, explores their inner lives, and keeps us guessing about what will happen next.

And there’s more here than Little League, fun and sometimes as painful as that particular piece of Americana can be.  His main character is back in the hometown he grew up in, along with his wife, and they’ve been married long enough for them to know each other all too well.  Gummer is very sharp in his depiction of the mid-life married life of modern American suburban couples, especially the challenges they face as their lives become focused on their children at the risk of losing sight of themselves and their relationships.  He uses Little League, small town life, pop culture and thwarted desires as fodder for a wonderful story that ultimately ends better than one might have imagined.

Tom Perrotta gave a great blurb to author Gummer for this book: “Parents Behaving Badly isn’t just a sharp satire about Little League madness; it’s also a shrewd and sympathetic portrait of a mid-life marriage. Scott Gummer writes with equal insight about wayward spouses and conniving coaches.”  Perrotta is among my favorites of contemporary novelists, and I’m happy to say that if you like his work, you will love Parents Behaving Badly, which while in no way derivative, is certainly in the same vein as Perrotta’s novels.

Scott gives a great interview, doubtless because of his years of experience as a working journalist.  He knows how to talk about his work and to present his story vividly without giving too much away.  I recommend his website as well.  He’s also written a couple of very interesting nonfiction books about golf (this is his first published novel).

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Nick Mamatas: Sensation

978-1604863543 – PM Press – paperback – $14.95 (e-book editions available)

“When Julia Hernandez leaves her husband, shoots a real estate developer, and then vanishes without a trace, she slips out of the world she knew and into the Simulacrum—a place where human history is both guided and thwarted by the conflict between a species of anarchist wasps and a collective of hyperintelligent spiders. When Julia’s ex-husband Raymond spots her in a grocery store he doesn’t usually patronize, he’s soon drawn into an underworld of radical political gestures where Julia is the new media sensation of both this world and the Simulacrum.”

Nick Mamatas is an incredibly inventive writer.  Sensation combines comedy, inter-species communication, fantastic imagination, social and political critique into a fast moving, tightly plotted and very unusual storyline.  By combining a science fiction bent with a hyper-real portrayal of modern digitally connected culture, Mamatas is able to play with all the elements of modern everyday life, so we see things differently, perhaps even more clearly.

In some ways like The Matrix, there is an invisible world around and behind our own.  Fittingly, in Sensation, that world is essentially woven by a species of spiders that has created an very special relationship with the human world, one that is far from predictable and complicated in its own right.  These spiders care about humans, protect them, and use them for their own purposes in an ongoing war with a parasitic species of wasps.  On this unlikely and unusual premise, Mamatas has built a fantastic story.

I enjoyed reading this book on a number of levels, not the least of which for the author’s simultaneously dark, comedic and critical approach to our modern digital, paranoid, corporatized and controlled society.  I do like it when a novelist can successfully include political critique in a work of fiction.  Mamatas is an accomplished writer with a dystopian outlook I enjoy.  And similarly I enjoyed our conversation about this book and the author’s approach to writing.  I think you will appreciate his approach to talking about his work.

“Nick Mamatas continues his reign as the sharpest, funniest, most insightful and political purveyor of post-pulp pleasures going. He is the People’s Commissar of Awesome.” — China Mieville, award-winning author of Kraken and The City and the City

Nick’s website is well worth a visit as well as his online journal (Nihilistic Kid).

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Anna Lappe: Diet for a Hot Planet

978-1-60819-465-0 – Bloomsbury – Paperback – $15.00 (ebook editions available)

Anna Lappe´ is the daughter of the well-known activist and writer Frances Moore Lappe´, author of the classic Diet for a Small Planet, a book that introduced Americans to the idea of thinking about food and its role in ecology and the world economy, and how food is so deeply intertwined with economics and politics.  Anna has therefore been involved in food issues since she was a child.  She and her mother collaborated on another interesting and challenging book, Hope’s Edge in 2002. So it’s not a surprise that she is so thoroughly cogent and coherent writing and talking about food issues in the context of climate change.

As Anna says on one of her many website, takeabite.cc, “the food system is responsible for as much as one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions are particularly alarming because the food sector is the biggest driver behind methane and nitrous oxide emissions, which have global warming effects many times more powerful than carbon dioxide.”  In Diet for a Hot Planet, Lappe´ goes straight to the heart of the issue: if we are going to think about the global climate crisis, we have to think about our food system, and if we are going to make change to mitigate the effects of climate change, we must make changes (now) in the global industrialized food system that dominates most of the world today.

This book was extensively and deeply researched; Lappe´ talked to many scientists, went to UN, governmental, corporate, and grassroots agriculture conferences, worked her way through many lengthy and dense reports and studies, and also visited organic farms around the world.

In this book she has put together an impressive array of facts proving that global industrial agriculture—specifically the use of hazardous chemicals, concentrated animal feeding operations, biotech crops, and processed foods—is impoverishing the land, destroying rain forests, polluting waterways, and emitting nearly a third of the greenhouse gases that are heating the planet.

By contrast, intelligently designed and operated organic-farming methods reduce carbon emissions and toxic waste while at the same time nurture soil and biodiversity.  Lappe´is convinced (and will likely convince you) that eating according to ecologically appropriate principles can not only influence the marketplace and help combat world hunger and climate change, but will make us healthier and safer as well.  Lappé also decodes food labeling, exposes Big Ag’s “greenwashing” tactics, and offers “seven principles of a climate-friendly diet.”

With a terrific foreword by the brilliant Bill McKibben, Diet for a Hot Planet should be essential reading for anyone who is trying to grapple with making real change in the way we live on this fragile planet.  Anna is a terrific public speaker and our talk for WritersCast is lively, full of information, and optimistic and positive as Anna herself.

Anna Lappe´related organizations and websites should be on your bookmark list:

The Small Planet Institute

Take a Bite Out of Climate Change

Anna Lappe’s Blog

Small Planet Fund

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Caroline Leavitt: Pictures of You

978-1565126312 – Algonquin Books – $13.95 – paperback original (ebook versions also available)

I’ve become a big fan of Caroline Leavitt’s work – I read Girls in Trouble last year and interviewed this very entertaining and engaging author about that book for WritersCast in 2010 (listen to that interview here).

Pictures of You starts with a car crash, and some of the unanswered questions about how and why it happened, inexorably and permanently linking the lives of two families.  These complicated relationships are at the core of the novel.  There are many threads to unravel in this story, and it was for me a completely compelling book to read.  The two women involved in the crash, Isabelle and April, were both fleeing their lives at the time; the crash stops time for both of them, one literally, the other figuratively and psychologically.

Isabelle is the woman who survives the crash; her connection to the other woman, April, who does not, and April’s family (who lived only six blocks away from her when the crash occured), is what drives the novel forward.  There’s a great deal of pain and suffering in this novel, but it is never overwhelming, we are drawn to these characters and recognize the choices they make, and sympathize with their difficulties throughout, the imperfections of human beings we fully recognize in our own lives.

This is a complex story about the nature of family, how we depend on others and how they let us down in small and large ways, and how people are able to recreate their lives, sometimes painfully, when those lives have been broken.  Carolyn See wrote a wonderful review of the novel for the Washington Post that ends with this wonderful description: “This is a novel that invites us to look at our own imperfections, not the dramatic crimes, but the niggling little sins of omission that so often render our lives tragically undernourished and small.”

If you have not discovered the work of Caroline Leavitt (she’s a busy writer, the author of ten novels, writes criticism for the Boston Globe and People, teaches novel writing for UCLA online, and judges fiction awards too), Pictures of You would be a great book to start with.  It’s complex and rewarding, and deeply humane.

Caroline blogs at CarolineLeavittville.com and has a fun website as well (Welcome to Leavitt Town…)

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