Sunday, December 12, 2010

Your 2011 Shopping List

Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley
Little Bee by Chris Cleave
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson
A Long Time Ago and Essentially True by Brigid Pasulka
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
In the Heart of the Sea by Nathanial Philbrick
The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander
Tamar by Mal Peet

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Heather's Suggestions

Between Here and April
by Deborah Copaken Kogan
304 pages

Synopsis: When a deep-rooted memory suddenly surfaces, Elizabeth Burns becomes obsessed with the long-ago disappearance of her childhood friend April Cassidy. Driven to investigate, Elizabeth discovers a thirty-five-year-old newspaper article revealing the details that had been hidden from her as a child—shocking revelations about April’s mother, Adele.

Elizabeth, now herself a mother, tracks down the people who knew Adele Cassidy and who thought that they knew what was going through her mind before she committed that most incomprehensible of crimes. She seeks out anyone who might help piece together the final months, days, and hours of this troubled woman’s life—from Adele’s former neighbor to her psychiatrist to her sister.

But the answers are more elusive than any normal investigation can yield, the questions raised are difficult to contemplate. In fact, the further into the story Elizabeth digs, the more she is forced to accept that she and Adele might not be so different.

Elizabeth’s exploration thus leads her ultimately back to herself: her compromised marriage, her increasing self-doubt, her desire for more out of her career and her life, and finally to a fearsome reckoning with what it means to be a wife and mother.


The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

by Aimee Bender
292 pages

Synopsis: On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose.

The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden—her mother’s life outside the home, her father’s detachment, her brother’s clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern.


Remarkable Creatures

by Tracy Chevalier
320 pages

Synopsis: On the windswept, fossil-strewn beaches of the English coast, poor and uneducated Mary Anning learns that she has a unique gift: "the eye" to spot fossils no one else can see. When she uncovers an unusual fossilized skeleton in the cliffs near her home, she sets the religious community on edge, the townspeople to gossip, and the scientific world alight. After enduring bitter cold, thunderstorms, and landslips, her challenges only grow when she falls in love with an impossible man.

Mary soon finds an unlikely champion in prickly Elizabeth Philpot, a middle-class spinster who shares her passion for scouring the beaches. Their relationship strikes a delicate balance between fierce loyalty, mutual appreciation, and barely suppressed envy, but ultimately turns out to be their greatest asset.



Colette's Suggestions

Outliers: The Story of Success
by Malcolm Gladwell
320 pages

Synopsis: In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"—the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band. Brilliant and entertaining, OUTLIERS is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.


Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Some Don't
by Jim Collins
300 pages (HARDCOVER)

Synopsis: Five years ago, Jim Collins asked the question, "Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?" In Good to Great Collins, the author of Built to Last, concludes that it is possible, but finds there are no silver bullets. Collins and his team of researchers
began their quest by sorting through a list of 1,435 companies, looking for those that made substantial improvements in their performance over time. They finally settled on 11--including Fannie Mae, Gillette, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo--and discovered common traits that challenged many of the conventional notions of corporate success. Making the transition from good to great doesn't require a high-profile CEO, the latest technology, innovative change management, or even a fine-tuned business strategy. At the heart of those rare and truly great companies was a corporate culture that rigorously found and promoted disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner. Peppered with dozens of stories and examples from the great and not so great, the book offers a well-reasoned road map to excellence that any organization would do well to consider. Like Built to Last, Good to Great is one of those books that managers and CEOs will be reading and rereading for years to come.

Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love
by Sue Johnson
320 pages

Synopsis: Developed over 20 years ago and practiced all over the world, Emotionally Focused Therapy has been heralded by Time magazine and the New York Times as one of the only types of therapy to actually work. Couples who practice EFT see a 75% success rate (compared to 30% for other forms of relationship therapy). EFT focuses on the emotional connection of every relationship by de-escalating conflict, creating a safe emotional connection, and strengthening bonds between partners.

Now in paperback, HOLD ME TIGHT introduces readers to EFT and illustrates a program they can use in their own relationships. Part I introduces the view of love as an attachment bond and applies this view to relationship problems. Part II offers seven "conversations" that focus on key moments. Readers can use these to understand their responses and relationships better. Included are exercises to help couples work through the process.

Friday, December 3, 2010

Melanie's Suggestions

Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt
by Robert Gottlieb
256 pages (HARDCOVER)

Synopsis: Gottlieb launches Yale’s Jewish Lives series with a digestible account of the life and times of the “Divine Sarah.” Although much has been already been written about Sarah, most of it has been embellished—the imaginative actress herself was not above creatively reworking or entirely fabricating episodes from her own life. What Gottlieb attempts, and mostly succeeds in doing, is separating the legend from the reality. When he is unable to do so definitively, he grounds each scenario in whatever historical evidence or plausible data does exist, allowing readers to draw their own educated conclusions. Where this biography truly shines, however, is in the mini-portraits of the people who played significant roles in Sarah’s saga; family, friends, colleagues, rivals, admirers, detractors, and lovers are vividly brought to life. The result: one of the greatest actresses of all time stars in the story of her life, surrounded by an extraordinary cast of supporting characters.
Falling Home
by Karen White
464 pages

Synopsis: Cassie Madison has it all: a high-powered advertising career, a stylish Manhattan apartment, and a sophisticated, rich, and gorgeous fiance. It's a far cry from her childhood in Walton, Georgia, home of the annual Kudzu Festival and hot, sticky summers. And then there are all the bad memories, the heartache. When Cassie's estranged sister calls to say that her father
is dying, Cassie knows it's time to set aside her feelings and go home and face the sister she hasn't seen in 15 years. When her father dies, he leaves the family home to Cassie, who can't wait to get rid of it and get back to New York, her job, and her fiance, even if it means having a developer tear down the house. But something keeps her in Walton, and she doesn't know if it's her mending relationship with her sister; the irresistible, aggravating Sam Parker, who wants her to preserve her house; or the fee
ling of finally being home.

Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Education in Afghanistan and Pakistan
by Greg Mortenson
448 pages

Synopsis: In his latest book, Greg Mortenson hosts the reader as a valuable and welcomed traveling companion as he retraces his steps through the most remote areas of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier areas and the formidable terrain of Afghanistan holding a mirror to our humanity. Mortneson introduces us to his trusted companions, turned employees, of Central Asia Institute, the so-called "Dirty Dozen", who truly embody the virtues of goodwill and perseverance in the name of literacy and, of course, God.

Mortenson's committment to cross-cultural understanding beyond the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan is rivaled only by his determination to educate the under-served girls in the most remote areas of these countries. Stones into Schools is a suspenseful, heart-breaking as it is heart-warming, true account of a life well lived and a people well served. Mortenson is an honor to the human race and a diplomat for world peace. About now, Greg Mortenson would do well to take his own advice and sit for a month under a walnut tree to recuperate.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Jeana's Suggestions

The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
464 pages

Synopsis: Set during the Great Depression, it traces the migration of an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family to California and their subsequent hardships as migrant farm workers. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1940. The work did much to publicize the injustices of migrant labor. The narrative, interrupted by prose-poem interludes, chronicles the struggles of the Joad family's life on a failing Oklahoma farm, their difficult journey to California, and their disillusionment once they arrive there and fall prey to a parasitic economic system. The insularity of the Joads--Ma's obsession with family togetherness, son Tom's self-centeredness, and daughter Rose of Sharon's materialism--ultimately gives way to a sense of universal community.

In the Heart of the Sea
by Nathanial Philbrick
302 pages

Synopsis: In 1820, the 240-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, it was repeatedly rammed and sunk by an eighty-ton bull sperm whale. Its twenty-man crew, fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, made for the 3,000-mile-distant coast of South America in three tiny boats. During ninety days at sea under horrendous conditions, the survivors clung to life as one by one they succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear. In the Heart of the Sea tells perhaps the greatest sea story ever. Philbrick interweaves his account of this extraordinary ordeal of ordinary men with a wealth of whale lore and with a brilliantly detailed portrait of the lost, unique community of Nantucket whalers.

Impeccably researched and beautifully told, the book delivers the ultimate portrait of man against nature, drawing on a remarkable range of archival and modern sources, including a long-lost account by the ship's cabin boy. At once a literary companion and a page turner that speaks to the same issues of class, race, and man's relationship to nature that permeate the works of Melville, In the Heart of the Sea will endure as a vital work of American history.

Joy School
by Elizabeth Berg
208 pages

Synopsis: In this exquisite new novel by bestselling writer Elizabeth Berg, a young girl falls in love - and learns how sorrow can lead to an understanding of joy. Katie has moved to Missouri with her distant, occasionally abusive father. She feels very alone: her much-loved mother is dead; she finds it difficult to settle in, in her new school and her only friends fall far short of being ideal companions. When she falls through the ice while skating, she meets Jimmy. He is handsome, older than her, and married, but she is entranced. As their relationship unfolds, so too does Katie's awareness of the pain and intensity first love can bring. Those that hurt the most can sometimes teach us the lessons that really matter.

Kim's Suggestions

Tamar
by Mal Peet
432 pages

Synopsis: When her grandfather dies, Tamar inherits a box containing clues and coded messages. Out of the past another Tamar emerges, a man involved in the terrifying world of resistance fi ghters in Nazi-occupied Holland. His story is one of passion, love, jealousy, and tragedy, and unraveling it will transform Tamar's life.





Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
by Jamie Ford
320 pages

Synopsis: In the opening pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol.

This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war, when young Henry’s world is a jumble of confusion and excitement, and to his father, who is obsessed with the war in China and having Henry grow up American. While “scholarshipping” at the exclusive Rainier Elementary, where the white kids ignore him, Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student. Amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge a bond of friendship–and innocent love–that transcends the long-standing prejudices of their Old World ancestors. And after Keiko and her family are swept up in the evacuations to the internment camps, she and Henry are left only with the hope that the war will end, and that their promise to each other will be kept.

Forty years later, Henry Lee is certain that the parasol belonged to Keiko. In the hotel’s dark dusty basement he begins looking for signs of the Okabe family’s belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot begin to measure. Now a widower, Henry is still trying to find his voice–words that might explain the actions of his nationalistic father; words that might bridge the gap between him and his modern, Chinese American son; words that might help him confront the choices he made many years ago.


Cutting For Stone
by Abraham Verghese
688 pages

Synopsis: A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel–an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics–their passion for the same woman–that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him–nearly destroying him–Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.

An unforgettable journey into one man’s remarkable life, and an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others.


Shelley's Suggestions

The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar
by Robert Alexander
229 pages

Synopsis: The final days of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, and his family are still a fascinating mystery. There is no one left to bear witness to what happened at the execution. Or is there? Alexander takes a very real, but forgotten and overlooked, potential witness, a young kitchen boy, and creates an amazing fictional account of what may have transpired. Leonka was working as a kitchen boy to the Romanov family when the Bolsheviks captured them, exiled them to Siberia, and imprisoned them in their house. Because of his lowly position in the household, Leonka was able to see and hear secret things. And he does keep them secret until decades later, knowing he is ready to die, he reveals all he knows about the imperial family and their horrific death. Alexander includes as much historically accurate information into his fiction as possible, and he includes actual letters and notes attributed to the Romanovs, which add a touch of authenticity. He also renders the plot beautifully with one final jaw-dropping and satisfying twist.

Poison Study
by Maria Snyder
416 pages

Synopsis: Shivers, obsession, sleepless nights—these are the results not of one of the milder poisons that novice food-taster Yelena must learn during her harrowing job training but of newcomer Snyder's riveting fantasy that unites the intelligent political focus of George R.R. Martin with a subtle yet potent romance. Through a stroke of luck, Yelena escapes execution in exchange for tasting the food of the Commander, ruler of Ixia. Though confined to a dank prison cell and doomed to a painful death, Yelena slowly blooms again, caught up in castle politics. But some people are too impatient to wait for poison to finish off Yelena. With the help of Valek, her steely-nerved, cool-eyed boss and the Commander's head of security, she soon discovers that she has a starring role to play in Ixia's future—a role that could lead to her being put to death as a budding magician even if she hits each cue perfectly. The first in a series, this is one of those rare books that will keep readers dreaming long after they've read it.

A Long Long Time Ago and Essentially True
by Brigid Pasulka
368 pages

Synopsis: Pasulka's delightful debut braids together two tales of old and new Poland. The old is the fairy tale love story of the Pigeon, a young man so entranced by village beauty Anielica that he builds her family a house to prove his devotion. When war comes to Poland, the Pigeon works for the resistance, guarding the town and his Jewish sister-in-law with creativity and bravery. After the war, he and Anielica get engaged and the Pigeon brings his family to Kraków, but the fabled promises of the golden city and the glories of communism prove hollow. The new tale is about Anielica and the Pigeon's granddaughter, Beata, whose plainness has earned her the nickname Baba Yaga. Now living in a much-changed Kraków, Beata is a bar girl with no hopes of love or plans for the future. When tragedy strikes and Beata uncovers family secrets, she brings together the old and new to create her own bright future. Pasulka creates a world that's magical despite the absence of magical happenings, and where Poland's history is bound up in one family's story.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Joanne's Suggestions

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
464 pages

Synopsis: Pollan examines what he calls "our national eating disorder" (the Atkins craze, the precipitous rise in obesity) in this remarkably clearheaded book. It's a fascinating journey up and down the food chain, one that might change the way you read the label on a frozen dinner, dig into a steak or decide whether to buy organic eggs. You'll certainly never look at a Chicken McNugget the same way again.Pollan approaches his mission not as an activist but as a naturalist: "The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world." All food, he points out, originates with plants, animals and fungi. "[E]ven the deathless Twinkie is constructed out of... well, precisely what I don't know offhand, but ultimately some sort of formerly living creature, i.e., a species. We haven't yet begun to synthesize our foods from petroleum, at least not directly."Pollan's narrative strategy is simple: he traces four meals back to their ur-species. He starts with a McDonald's lunch, which he and his family gobble up in their car. Surprise: the origin of this meal is a cornfield in Iowa. Corn feeds the steer that turns into the burgers, becomes the oil that cooks the fries and the syrup that sweetens the shakes and the sodas, and makes up 13 of the 38 ingredients (yikes) in the Chicken McNuggets.Indeed, one of the many eye-openers in the book is the prevalence of corn in the American diet; of the 45,000 items in a supermarket, more than a quarter contain corn. Pollan meditates on the freakishly protean nature of the corn plant and looks at how the food industry has exploited it, to the detriment of everyone from farmers to fat-and-getting-fatter Americans. Besides Stephen King, few other writers have made a corn field seem so sinister.Later, Pollan prepares a dinner with items from Whole Foods, investigating the flaws in the world of "big organic"; cooks a meal with ingredients from a small, utopian Virginia farm; and assembles a feast from things he's foraged and hunted.This may sound earnest, but Pollan isn't preachy: he's too thoughtful a writer, and too dogged a researcher, to let ideology take over. He's also funny and adventurous. He bounces around on an old International Harvester tractor, gets down on his belly to examine a pasture from a cow's-eye view, shoots a wild pig and otherwise throws himself into the making of his meals.

The Botany of Desire
by Michael Pollan
271 pages

Synopsis: In 1637, one Dutchman paid as much for a single tulip bulb as the going price of a town house in Amsterdam. Three and a half

centuries later, Amsterdam is once again the mecca for people who care passionately about one particular plant thought this time the obsessions re

volves around the intoxicating effects of marijuana rather than the visual beauty of the tulip. How could flowers, of all things, become such objects of desire that they can drive men to financial ruin?

In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan argues that the answer lies at the heart of the intimately reciprocal relationship between people and plants. In telling the stories of four familiar plant species that are deeply woven into the fabric of our lives, Pollan illustrates how they evolved to satisfy humankinds's most basic yearnings and by doing so made themselves indispensable. For, just as we've benefited from these plants, the plants, in the grand co-evolutionary scheme that Pollan evokes so brilliantly, have done well by us. The sweetness of apples, for example, induced the early Americans to spread the species, giving the tree a whole new continent in which to blossom. So who is really domesticating whom?

Weaving fascinating anecdotes and accessible science into gorgeous prose, Pollan takes us on an absorbing journey that will change the way we think about our place in nature.


The Enchanted April
by Elizabeth von Arnim
208 pages

Synopsis: Four English ladies, strangers to each other, rent a villa for a month near Portofino.

Amy's Suggestions

The Mouse that Roared
by Leonard Wibberley
280 pages

Synopsis: The basis of the 1959 film starring Peter Sellers, this classic cold war satire-cum-parable-cum-political farce was first serialized in the Saturday Evening Post almost 50 years ago, appearing under the title The Day New York Was Invaded. At the time, the U.S. was afraid of a nuclear attack by Russia — the idea of an attack by a small country was so absurd as to seem comical. Wibberley’s tiny European nation is furious about unfair U.S. trading practices, so they send an army to invade New York City, march up Broadway, and accidentally capture the world’s newest and most destructive bomb. Then they have to figure out what to do with it. A whimsical cross between Kubrick and Kafka, The Mouse That Roared is a quirky classic of world literature, a poignant tale of political morality, and a hilarious, ultimately triumphant portrait of international relations from the perspective of the little guy.

The Book of Lost Things
by John Connolly
480 pages

Synopsis: High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the death of his mother. He is angry and alone, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness, and as he takes refuge in his imagination, he finds that reality and fantasy have begun to meld. While his family falls apart around him, David is violently propelled into a land that is a strange reflection of his own world, populated by heroes and monsters, and ruled over by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a mysterious book... The Book of Lost Things.

An imaginative tribute to the journey we must all make through the loss of innocence into adulthood, John Connolly's latest novel is a book for every adult who can recall the moment when childhood began to fade, and for every adult about to face that moment. The Book of Lost Things is a story of hope for all who have lost, and for all who have yet to lose. It is an exhilarating tale that reminds us of the enduring power of stories in our lives.


The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag
by Alan Bradley
400 pages

Synopsis: Flavia de Luce, a dangerously smart eleven-year-old with a passion for chemistry and a genius for solving murders, thinks that her days of crime-solving in the bucolic English hamlet of Bishop’s Lacey are over—until beloved puppeteer Rupert Porson has his own strings sizzled in an unfortunate rendezvous with electricity. But who’d do such a thing, and why? Does the madwoman who lives in Gibbet Wood know more than she’s letting on? What about Porson’s charming but erratic assistant? All clues point toward a suspicious death years earlier and a case the local constables can’t solve—without Flavia’s help. But in getting so close to who’s secretly pulling the strings of this dance of death, has our precocious heroine finally gotten in way over her head? (In paperback February, 2011)

Rosalie's Suggestions

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
by Helen Simonson
384 pages

Synopsis: The major of the title is a widower who has just lost his brother. Major Pettigrew slowly develops an extremely correct yet warm friendship with Mrs. Ali, a widow who runs the local convenience store and shares his love of reading.

England is not an easily welcoming place for those seen as outsiders. Mrs. Ali is part of a Pakistani family and
the pressures of Pakistani family life are sensitively portrayed, with Mrs. Ali torn between her family, especially her controlling brother-in-law, and the freedom the broader, liberal society of Britain has to offer.

That love can overcome cultural barriers is no new theme, but it’s presented here with great sensitivity and delicacy. We want this couple to find romance — and they do. We want the major to survive the machinations of his obnoxious son — and he does. “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” is refreshing in its optimism and its faith in the transformative possibilities of courtesy and kindness. Although pitched toward those wanting a gentle read, it also slides a powerful moral message into the interstices of village politics and conventions.

The Forgotten Garden
by Kate Mornon
370 pages

Synopsis: After her grandmother Nell's death, Cassandra learns that Nell wasn't who she thought she was. It turns out that Nell had been raised by a couple who found her on the dock after she had been abandoned on the boat that had carried her from England to Australia at the age of four. Nell had attempted to research her own heritage, but the sudden appearance of Cassandra in her life prevented her from putting all the pieces together. Cassandra takes it upon herself to solve the mystery for her grandmother once and for all. The story weaves back and forth between three generations -- Cassandra in 2005, Nell in 1975, and the two women in Cornwall who are the key to the puzzle in the early years of the twentieth century

Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
by Immaculee Ilibagazia
219 pages

Synopsis: In 1994, Rwandan native Ilibagiza was 22 years old and home from college to spend Easter with her devout Catholic family when the death of Rwanda's Hutu president sparked a three-month slaughter of nearly one million ethnic Tutsis. She survived by hiding in a Hutu pastor's tiny bathroom with seven other women for 91 cramped, terrifying days. The account of her experience cuts two ways: her description of the evil that was perpetrated, including the brutal murders of her family members, is devastating, yet the story of her unquenchable faith and connection to God throughout the ordeal uplifts and inspires. It was during those endless hours that Immaculee discovered the power of prayer, eventually shedding her fear of death and forging a profound and lasting relationship with God. She emerged from her bathroom hideout having unwavering trust in God. She did everything she could, then trusted him to help her find a job, later to find a husband, and eventually to seek out and forgive her family‛s killers. Her story is inspiring.

Charlotte's Suggestions

The Wet Engine
by Brian Doyle
170 pages

Synopsis: Nine years ago the author's wife gave birth to twin boys. One was entirely normal, but the other was missing a chamber in his heart. At five months and again at 18 months, Liam had open-heart surgery. Someday he will need a heart transplant, but for now he "runs around like an insane dorky gawky goofy heron and rides his bike and shoots hoop, and skateboards and swings and punches out his brother and snarls at his sister and refuses to make his bed...." This book is about Liam, and it is also about his surgeon, his family and dozens of others with heart-related stories. It is about heart as a physical organ—how it is supposed to work, how surgeons try to fix it when it doesn't—and about heart as a metaphor for "the distilled essence of character and spirit." Most of all, it is about love, which has "many forms and levels and shapes and flavors and speeds and depths and topographies and landscapes and colors and musics." Doyle, the author of four other books of essays, sometimes spins out of control with sprawling stream-of-consciousness sentences, and he says "waaaay" waaaay too often. Still, it is hard to put down this wide-ranging meditation on the fragile mysteries of human life."No one writes quite like Brian Doyle. He is lyrical, literate, unpredictable, unafraid, kind, and damned
funny. In this book, he is also incredibly moving, as he writes about his son's wounded heart and the doctors who save him. As he explores all the emotions and science leading outward into the world from his family's journey, we share in his curiosity and his reverence and his joy. A fine book."

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
by Jamie Ford
290 pages

Synopsis: In the opening pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel,

once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol. This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war, when young Henry’s world is a jumble of confusion and excitement, and to his father, who is obsessed with the war in China and having Henry grow up American. While “scholarshipping” at the exclusive Rainier Elementary, where the white kids ignore him, Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student. Amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge a bond of friendship–and innocent love–that transcends the long-standing prejudices of their Old World ancestors. And after Keiko and her family are swept up in the evacuations to the internment camps, she and Henry are left only with the hope that the war will end, and that their promise to each other will be kept. Forty years later, Henry Lee is certain that the parasol belonged to Keiko. In the hotel’s dark dusty basement he begins looking for signs of the Okabe family’s belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot begin to measure. Now a widower, Henry is still trying to find his voice–words that might explain the actions of his nationalistic

father; words that might bridge the gap between him and his modern, Chinese American son; words that might help him confront the choices he made many years ago. Set during one of the most conflicted and volatile times in American history, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is an extraordinary story of commitment and enduring hope. In Henry and Keiko, Jamie Ford has created an unforgettable duo whose story teaches us of the power of forgiveness and the human heart..

Women, Food, and God
by Geneen Roth
211 pages (hardcover)

Synopsis: The way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. No matter how sophisticated or wise or enlightened you believe you are, how you eat tells all. The world is on your plate. When you begin to understand what prompts you to use food as a way to numb or distract yourself, the process takes you deeper into realms of spirit and to the bright center of your own life. Rather than getting rid of or instantly changing your conflicted relationship with food, Women Food and God is about welcoming what is already here, and contacting the part of yourself that is already whole—divinity itself.

Tiffanie's Suggestions

The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery, Alison Anderson (Translator)
336 pages

Synopsis: We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renee, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renee is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she
scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.

Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and Renee hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through Renee's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
by Helen Simonson
384 pages

Synopsis: You are about to travel to Edgecombe St. Mary, a small village in the English countryside filled with rolling hills, thatched cottages, and a cast of characters both hilariously original and as familiar as the members of your own family. Among them is Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen Simonson's wondrous debut. Wry, courtly, opinionated, and completely endearing, Major Pettigrew is one of the most indelible characters in contemporary fiction, and from the very first page of this remarkable novel he will steal your heart.

The Major leads a quiet life valuing the proper things that Englishmen have lived by for generations: honor, duty, decorum, and a properly brewed cup of tea. But then his brother's death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more. But village society insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and her as the permanent foreigner. Can their relationship survive the risks one takes when pursuing happiness in the face of culture and tradition?

Little Bee
by Chris Cleave
271 pages

Synopsis: The story opens in a refugee detention center outside of London. As the Nigerian narrator-who got her nickname "Little Bee" as a child-prepares to leave the center, she thinks of her homeland and recalls a horrific memory. "In the immigration detention center, they told us we must be disciplined," she says. "This is the discipline I learned: whenever I go into a new place, I work out how I would kill myself there. In case the men come suddenly, I make sure I am ready." After Little Bee's release, the first-person narration switches to Sarah, a magazine editor in London struggling to come to terms with her husband Andrew's recent suicide, as well as the stubborn behavior of her four-year-old son, Charlie, who refuses to take off his Batman costume. While negotiating her family troubles, Sarah reflects on "the long summer when Little Bee came to live with us." Cleave alternates the viewpoints of the two women, patiently revealing the connection between them. A few years prior, Sarah and Andrew took a vacation to the Nigerian coast, not realizing the full extent to which the oil craze had torn the country apart. One night they stumble upon Little Bee and her sister, who are fleeing a group of rapacious soldiers prowling the beach. The frightening confrontation proves life-changing for everyone involved, though in ways they couldn't have imagined. A few years later Sarah and Little Bee come together again in the suburbs of London, and their friendship-in addition to that between Little Bee and Charlie-provides some salvation for each woman. Thoughless piercing and urgent than his debut, Cleave's narrative pulses with portentous, nearly spectral energy, and the author maintains a well-modulated balance between the two narrators. A solid sophomore effort, and hopefully a sign of even better things to come.