In an unnamed American city, seven people wait to apply for visas to visit India. When an earthquake rips through the city, two workers from the Indian visa office are trapped along with the strangers: a Chinese teenager and her grandmother who speaks no English; an older Caucasian couple who have little to say to once another; a young Muslim-American man who trusts no one; an Indian graduate student facing family conflicts over her love life; and an ex-military African-American with breathing problems, with only a few puffs left on his inhaler.

As time passes, the smell of gas begins to permeate the office, conflicts arise and supplies of food and fresh water dwindle. Their situation becomes increasingly dire and these nine individuals must overcome their prejudices and fears if they wish to survive. And so they take it in turns to share a story from their life – showing the power of story to transform, heal and sustain a group of strangers.

I should admit right from the start that I have long been a fan of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, ever since I read Mistress of Spices and Sisters of My Heart. Each new novel is a treasure to be savoured, requiring restraint to make it last. So it was with eager anticipation that I began her newest, One Amazing Thing.

Unlike her earlier works, I was not immediately carried away by her words. It required perseverance to carry on reading and my initial reaction was one of avoidance. I was shocked, because Divakaruni’s evocative language still carries power and the ability to transport readers: “The dark was full of women’s voices, keening in a language he did not know, so that at first he thought he was back in the war. The thought sucked the air from his lungs and left him chocking.”

As I read these words I could feel the claustrophobia and fear the characters were feeling and I realized – the “real” world has carried so many images recently of the terrible devastation caused by earthquakes; first Indonesia, then Haiti and now Chile that One Amazing Thing strikes too close to home for me to give an honest review.

I finished the novel in a fairly short period, roughly a week. Some of the stories engaged more than others and her choice to write the novel as a set of connected stories, similar to The Canterbury Tales or The Decameron has great possibilities. I suspect that in six months or a year this will be a novel I read again and find much to exclaim about. For now, I have news footage from Haiti playing in my head.

ISBN10: 1401340997
ISBN13: 9781401340995

Hardcover
240 Pages
Publisher: Voice
Publication Date: February 2, 2010
Author Website: www.chitradivakaruni.com

Back in February 2007 I had the pleasure of reviewing an exciting new knitting book, Mason-Dixon Knitting. No one then could dream that, 3 years later, more than 6,200 of their Ball-Band Dischcloth would have been knitted and posted on Ravelry (the universe alone knows how many of these have truly been knit) or that their Nashville homage, Pardon Me (I Didn’t Knit That for You), would become a viral sensation.

To celebrate the release of Mason-Dixon Knitting in paperback, Gardiner and Shayne have launched their newest homage (to the documentary Grey Gardens), Grey Garments. So grab your needles, your copy of Mason-Dixon Knitting and some cotton to knit a dish cloth with Ann and Kay. They’ll have you in stitches!

Jessica Luna’s life contains all the average troubles of a twenty-something living in Houston. There’s the man trouble cause by gifted and troubled artist Guillermo who is unable to “commit” and always seems to disappoint. Then there’s her “perfect” sister who married a white man and moved to the suburbs and seems to want to turn Jessica into a suburban clone. Then there’s her boring corporate job and now her parents are fighting. Where’s a girl supposed to turn for help?

Well if you’re Jessica, the signs or answers could be anywhere: her rearview mirror Virgin-de-Guadalupe; the card readings of psychic Madame Hortensia; or in the prophetic utterances of a TV talk show host. Now Madame Hortensia has confirmed that a change is coming in work and love, but Jessica isn’t sure that Jonathan, the rich and successful guy her sister introduced her to, is that new guy. But when Madame Hortensia refuses to come through with answers – and her life starts dissolving around her – Jessica realizes it’s time to figure some things out for herself.

Gwendolyn Zepeda’s debut novel is a fresh voice in the growing “chica lit” market. A sub-genre of chic lit, chica lit first gained notice with the publication of The Dirty Girls Social Club. Author Mary Castillo explains what makes chica lit different: “Family is always involved somehow.” “Unlike early chick lit that kind of created the image that it’s always about single women worrying about their shoes, in the ethnic books they’re trying to balance their ethnicity and being American. How can you be both? The issues seem to be a little deeper.”

It would be easy for people to dismiss Houston, We Have a Problema as a fluffy offering but Zepeda offers an important message about finding your place in the world, and within your own family. Anyone who has ever found themselves torn between two worlds or found themselves floundering and without direction will find reflections of themselves here.

While the writing is sometimes uneven and a few characters are rather two-dimensional, Zepeda shows great promise as a comedic writer. Madame Hortensia’s personality, flair and vibrancy fairly bursts off the page. Perhaps there’s another novel in her future?

ISBN10: 0446698520
ISBN13: 9780446698528

Trade Paperback
392 Pages
Publisher: Grand Central
Publication Date: January 2009
Author Website: www.gwendolynzepeda.com

The organization I work with, COMAP (Centre for Community Mapping) has developed a new social enterprise (Mapadit) that will help provide long term support to all of our systems, including the Mennonite Heritage Portrait and Your Heritage Waterloo Region, as well as NewsAtlas. We have found a source of reveue – the Aviva Community Fund – which has created a public competition to find projects to fund and need public support to make it to the finals. We’re competing with projects from across Canada.

Please vote to support COMAP’s social enterprise entry to the Aviva Community Fund. The top 20 projects from this first round of voting will make it to the semi-finals when we’ll once again need your support to make it to the finals.

You can vote once each day for the next 13 days. Please vote, comment and tell your friends. Help us build a new source of much-needed revenue for community non-profits. The benefits of this project will support many non-profits across Canada.

Thank you for your support! Please feel free to contact me with any questions.
Janelle

Elizabeth George returns with a new collection of short stories focused on two of the seven deadly sins – lust and greed. Two of the Deadliest: new tales of lust, greed, and murder from outstanding women of mystery features never before published stories from eighteen top female crime writers (including George herself) and five up and coming authors. George asked the authors “to create a new story that had as its backdrop either lust or greed or both of them.”

Faced with almost two dozen stories, it is impossible to mention everything that stands out in such a short review. So I’ll focus on two stories that captured my attention and then mention a few other notable selections.

The first is “E-Male” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (who publishes as Kris Nelscott), an award-winning author I hadn’t encountered before. Her tale of cyber-stalking, while a cautionary tale to those who live much of their life online, turns the “traditional” model on its head. Gavin is obsessed with Stella, his ex-girlfriend, and he’s an excellent hacker. This gives him unprecedented access to her virtual identity despite the restraining order she’s obtained. For Gavin this provides a morning treat of reading her email, and in a quirk of fate, it is this access that helps him determine she’s missing when even her colleagues and family haven’t figured it out. From cyber-stalker to digital superhero?

In “Your Turn” by Carolyn Hart, Terri cheats on her dying husband Leo. When he tells her he’s changing his will the next day, she briefly unplugs his oxygen to save her inheritance. One week after his death she receives a note from Leo under her pillow. “Murder will out, Terri…I’ve planned a more exciting game for you.” Can she beat a dead man to stay out of jail?

Other notables are “Back to School Essay” by newcomer Patricia Fogarty, “A Madness of Two” by Peggy Hesketh and “Lusting for Jenny, Inverted” by Elizabeth George. Two of the Deadliest is a wonderful introduction to some strong, female authors and for that reason it can be forgiven some unevenness.

ISBN10: 0061350338
ISBN13: 9780061350337

Hardcover
480 Pages
Publisher: Harper
Publication Date: July 21, 2009
Author Website: www.elizabethgeorgeonline.com

Many mothers long for a vacation from their life, a few days where someone takes care of them for a change. For most, this remains a dream but Sally Thorning turns it into reality. When a longed-for work trip is cancelled at the last moment, Sally sees the chance to grab a break from her young family. She treats herself to a secret holiday at a remote hotel where she meets Mark Bretherick. In between spa treatments and sleep she indulges in a short affair and after a week she returns home to her life refreshed.

A year passes and one evening Sally is watching the news with her husband Nick when she hears that Mark Bretherick’s wife Geraldine and daughter Lucy have been murdered. In shock she realizes that despite all the details being the same, the Mark Bretherick on the screen is not the man she spent a week with – but what should she do? Going to the police may expose her secret to Nick but keeping quiet may put her and her family in danger. Whatever Sally may have chosen to do is pushed aside when she realizes she’s being followed, and that she could be Geraldine’s twin. In desperation she sends the police an anonymous note but is it enough to spur action?

Sophie Hannah’s third novel The Wrong Mother (published in the UK as The Point of Rescue) is both a psychological detective story and a story of mothers under extreme pressure. Like her previous novel Little Face, Hannah exposes intimate secrets to public scrutiny and explores what it means to be a mother. The police on the case are convinced that Geraldine murdered her daughter and then committed suicide; what woman could write as she did in her diary and not be guilty? Yet Mark is convinced that Geraldine and Lucy were murdered by a man named “William Markes” and slowly, the reader begins to agree.

This is not an easy book to read; Hannah has crossed an invisible line and heads straight into the territory of which no one speaks. Motherhood is difficult and at times very hard work. Many mothers of very young children struggle and dream of walking away, yet still love their children. Some even have moments when they are sure their children are willfully tormenting them. Geraldine calls this the ‘conspiracy of silence.’ Anyone who has spent any length of time in childcare of the very young will recognize flashes of their own feelings in the pages of The Wrong Mother, and that’s what makes this an uncomfortable read, squirm-inducing at times. None of us want to admit that we see bits of ourselves reflected in “the horrible mothers” described within.

Despite the difficult topic, and that there may be hard truths to face within, The Wrong Mother is a captivating read. Full of plot twists, red-herrings and psychological labyrinths, the solution will catch most unaware. Yet the greater prize than figuring out “who-dun-it” is in the personal insight gained. Hannah is a gifted and compassionate writer who gently leads her readers from revulsion into reluctant understanding, taking tentative steps toward discussion of a taboo yet vital subject. By shining light on a “shameful” topic, she opens the way for new mothers to get the help and understanding they desperately require, without feeling ashamed and thinking themselves “the wrong mother.”

ISBN10: 0143116304
ISBN13: 9780143116301

Trade Paperback
432 pages
Publisher: Penguin
Publication Date: September 29, 2009
Author Website: www.sophiehannah.com
Sophie Hannah’s “soundtrack” for The Wrong Mother: Large Hearted Boy’s Book Notes

When Gwen Cooper’s veterinarian called to tell her about a BLIND, abandoned three-week-old kitten, she knew she was going to say no. She already had two cats and she didn’t want to be that twenty-something – the one other people talked about, the one with THREE cats. Beside, how good a life could a blind cat have? He’d never be able to do things other cats do, right?

Then she met Homer…and knew this adorable bundle of fur was coming home with her.

Gwen Cooper shares Homer’s journey, and consequently her own, in a tone of gentle wonder and amazement. Homer’s Odyssey: a Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned About Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat is the story of three pounds of fearless black fur and his pack –Scarlett, Vashti and his human Gwen. A daredevil who picks flies out of the air, faces life at a full run and regularly scales seven-foot high bookshelves, Homer offers boundless love to the people and animals that share his world.

Homer, being blind since birth, has never understood that, by human standards, he should be incapable of many things. Life for him is about continual discovery, yet this fearlessness causes great stress for the humans in his life. Homer’s belief that he can do anything helps Gwen find the courage to seek out a new career path and helped her discover her talent for writing non-fiction. Homer’s Odyssey could have easily ended up saccharine but Gwen gentle touch found a tone balances emotion, knowledge and laces it liberally with humour.

Homer’s Odyssey is a classic animal story that has important lessons for everyone. This is the perfect book for the animal lover on your holiday list or recent graduate. Homer has important lessons for all of us, about love and living life without limits.

ISBN10: 038534385X
ISBN13: 9780385343855

Hardcover
304 Pages
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Publication Date: August 25, 2009
Author’s Website: GwenCooper.com

Holly Miller is stuck in a dead-end job and lives in a run-down apartment in New York City. While she seems to live alone in reality Holly lives with “The Committee,” the five different personalities that make up her Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Residing in the Holly’s head are the faceless Boy in the red Converse; the ancient meditating Silent One; Sarge, who keeps her safe; whale-size Ruffles, the chip eater, and Betty Jane, the Southern belle. When flirtatious Betty Jane lands Holly a job as a cartoon voice-over artist, her life appears to stabilize and she is finally able to support herself. However, when the directors want to make Ruffles the star of the show, all hell breaks loose.

The first half of Sounds Like Crazy, the debut novel from Shana Mahaffey, reads like a farcical play on fast forward. Personalities rapidly appear/disappear, bizarre events happen and Betty Jane’s Southern drawl quickly feels “like a bad hang-over pounding against [one's] temples.”

The second half of Sounds Like Crazy is the stronger, as Holly focuses on her therapy and layer after layer is pulled away to reveal the events that led to Holly’s development of DID. The pace of the novel slows, Mahaffey’s writing style becomes clear and concise as she delves into a subject that clearly fascinates her, how the human mind works. While her narration is evocative (“…the familiar rattle of a Volkswagen Beetle…that sounded like a bag of rocks and sand shaking…”), the character of Holly remains quite undefined for a novel of this length (400 pages).

The comedic tone in the first section of Sounds Like Crazy stands in complete opposite to the rest of the book, so much so that one is led to suggest the book has multiple personalities. This attempt at levity and slapstick detracts from the strong voice that resounds from the second section. Like many debut novelist, Mahaffey tries to do too much in one novel and ultimately this detracts from the power of Holly’s story. If Mahaffey focuses her writing on other topics that interest her as much as the human mind, she should enjoy success as a novelist.

ISBN-10: 0451227913
ISBN13: 9780451227911

Trade Paperback
400 Pages
Publisher: NAL Trade
Publication Date: October 6, 2009
Author Website: www.shanamahaffey.com

Nate Morrissey has spent the past eighteen years trying to forget the tragic events of a stormy night in Mount Kelven. The decisions he and his Mormon girlfriend Laura made that night, set off a tragic train of events which culminated in their parents’ cars going off a bridge and landing on a boat full of children.

Nate, now a lawyer for a high price firm in New York City, has been sent by his boss to Mount Kelven to undertake some delicate investigations. His firm’s client, a prominent government official, was involved in the case Nate’s father was prosecuting at the time of his death and is now under investigation by CBS’s “60 Minutes” and new evidence may have been uncovered casting new light on the events of eighteen years ago.

“All he wanted, for now, was to feel the presence of some vague and undefined possibility.” p. 76, A Bridge Back

Patrick M. Garry’s new novel, A Bridge Back, is a novel about remorse and redemption. For the past eighteen years, Nate has floated along where life took him. Rather than being an active participant in his life, his focus was on achieving professional success and the rest of his life just happened. The result was predictable; even though he has achieved professional acclaim, emotionally he has remained frozen at the day of the accident.

Garry has crafted an emotionally stunted character who, despite blustering bravado, is an appealing, optimistic child. A naïf swept up in events he would prefer to remain buried, Nate realizes that “the tasks of repairing the past [are] unlimited.” Now that he has returned to Mount Kelven, the past has resurfaced and he is emotionally thawing. Readers will be caught up in this story of redemption and will struggle along with him to untangle the affairs of eighteen years ago.

Tragedy, especially when it involves children, can destroy both people and a town. Garry provides insight into the various ways human deal with traumatic events and the long-term ramifications. As an exploration of guilt, redemption and regret, A Bridge Back provides an engaging read, even though this reader wishes that some secondary characters were more fully realized.

ISBN10: 159299332X
ISBN13: 9781592993321

Trade Paperback
232 Pages
Publisher: Inkwater Press
Publication Date: February 18, 2008

Molly Marx’s death happened suddenly and police are trying to determine the cause of death. Last seen riding her bike through Riverside Park, her body is found on the bank of the Hudson River and it is uncertain if her death was accidental, suicide or murder. While Detective Hicks tries to uncover the truth about her death, Molly tries to adjust to life in Duration and learn the rules governing the recently deceased.

When Molly learns that she can watch those she’s left behind and that she’s been gifted with a preternatural bullshit detector, she is delighted. Her observations of her four-year-old daughter Annabel, her twin sister Lucy, her husband Barry and her best friend Brie lead Molly down memory lane and, as readers learn more about Molly’s past, the mist begins to clear on her present and her death.

Sally Koslow’s new book The Late, Lamented Molly Marx is an exploration of marriage, family life and friendship. Molly and Barry’s marriage was far from perfect. Despite the fact that he never ceased his infidelities, there was love within their marriage. As Molly reflects on her life and the months prior to her death, readers learn that marriage and fidelity are never black and white issues.

The Late, Lamented Molly Marx could easily have slid off the rails into a morass of self-pity but Koslow imbued Molly with strength of character. Instead of wailing “why me,” Molly reviews her choices, accepts responsibility for them and slowly finds peace in the Duration (Koslow’s concept of the afterlife).

While Molly rightly occupies centre-stage in Koslow’s novel, the secondary characters’ (her friends and family) growth, presented through Molly’s evolving perception and omniscient narration, is fascinating. Detective Hicks is dogged in his pursuit of the truth and what started as a standard template characterization becomes fully-fledged and commanding of reader’s empathy.

The only serious complaint that could be made about The Late, Lamented Molly Marx is Molly’s twin sister Lucy. The incident at Annabel’s day-care felt awkward and Lucy felt flat. Koslow could have explored the twin connection more, instead of keep Lucy as sharp angles that appeared to fight the narrative.

ISBN10: 0345506200
ISBN13: 9780345506207

Hardcover
320 Pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Publication Date: May 19, 2009
Author Website: www.sallykoslow.com