The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa is an elegant and restrained novel about a Mathematics Professor who has suffered a head injury and retains only 80 minutes of memory. Every 80 minutes he starts again completely from scratch, and remembers only what is written on notes he keeps pinned to his suit. He forms an unlikely, yet touching friendship with his housekeeper and her son. This is a beautifully told tale full of the magic of numbers and…
The Island by Victoria Hislop is a novel set on a small island off the coast of Crete called Spinalonga. Spinalonga was a leper colony for over half of the 20th century. The novel is beautifully written, well researched historical fiction. It is family saga, set on the island, and in the nearby village of Plaka, a small Greek seaside village in neighboring Crete. Hislop tells of the prejudice and misconceptions that surrounded leprosy at the time, and one families…
Wild is a bestselling memoir by Cheryl Strayed. Strayed, now in her forties writes of the time in her mid twenties, just after her mother had died suddenly of cancer at the young age of 45. Strayed was lost and her life was spiraling downwards, resulting in divorce, one night stands, and drugs. In order to pull her life together, Strayed decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. This is a bold move for an inexperienced backpacker and a woman…
The Mercy of Thin Air is a novel by Ronlyn Domingue that follows Raziela Nolan as she travels in the in between space for decades after her death, searching for her one true love. She dies young in an accident in New Orleans in the 1920’s, and the novel moves back and forth in time from her real life to her afterlife. Raziela and her mother were both activists for women’s rights in the early 1900’s. Its an interesting portrait…
After reading so many average novels, it is wonderful to read a truly extraordinary novel, and that is just what Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese is. Cutting for Stone takes the reader on a journey from India to Ethiopia, to NYC and back to Africa. It is an epic tale of twin brothers born on a fateful night when their mother died in childbirth and their surgeon father fled the country in distress. What follows is a richly detailed…
A commonly used device in novels is for someone to find a diary from the past written by their grandmother, uncovering all sorts of juicy secrets about their family history. I can’t tell you how many books I’ve read like this recently. I suspended my disbelief the first several times I read novels with this same theme, but found it harder this time in Sarah Jio’s novel The Violets of March. Most of the time this device works, and it…
A Different Kind of Normal by Cathy Lamb is a novel I have mixed feelings about. I can’t in all honesty say it’s a great book, because I found many faults in the writing, the one dimensional characters, the story, etc. Jaden Bruxelle, known as Boss Mom by her 17 year old son Tate, is struggling with mothering a brilliant boy born with a too big head, uneven eyes and a great sense of humor. He was left at birth…
Waiting by Ha Jin is a novel set in the New China of the Cultural Revolution, following one man for two decades while he tries to divorce his wife in his home village each year so he can marry his girlfriend in the city. Not much happens in this novel, except a lot of waiting as the title suggests. Jin has the rare ability to capture the details of everyday life and the emotions hidden under the surface. He taps…
Keeping the House by Ellen Barker is a novel spanning the first half of the twentieth century and three generations of a family settled in Pine Rapids, Wisconsin. Barker explores what it means to be the perfect wife, at the turn of the twentieth century, through two World Wars, and into the 1950’s. My favorite parts of the novel are the quotes from Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping at the beginning of each chapter. The novel jumps back in…
The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh is a deeply moving novel whose protagonist is Victoria, a damaged eighteen year old who has just been released from the foster-care system and left to navigate the world alone with no friends, family, home or job prospects. All she has is her knowledge of the Language of Flowers, taught to her by a former foster mother a decade ago. This novel was so heartbreaking, at times it was hard to read, yet…