Book Talk: ARTS & ENTERTAINMENTS, by Christopher Beha (Shelf Awareness)

Arts & Entertainments: A Novel
Christopher Beha (Facebook) (Twitter)
Ecco Press (July 1, 2014), trade paper (ISBN 006232246X / 9780062322463)
Fiction, 288 pages

A version of the following was previously published as a Starred Review in Shelf Awareness for Readers (July 15, 2014). Shelf Awareness provided me with a publisher-furnished galley to facilitate the review, and compensated me for the review they received and posted.

In his second novel, Arts and Entertainments, Christopher Beha (What Happened to Sophie Wilder) shifts his setting from the world of writers to that of unscripted reality television, but those worlds aren't really as different as they might seem. They're both about crafting stories; they just use different tools to do it.

When he left St. Albert's School, "Handsome Eddie" Hartley thought that he and his girlfriend Martha Martin both had long careers of acting out other people's stories ahead of them, but he was wrong. Fifteen years later, Martha is a household name with a hit TV drama, while Eddie is back at St. Albert's, halfheartedly teaching drama and struggling nearly as hard to start a family with his wife, Susan, as he once did with his acting career. And a struggling schoolteacher who happens to possess a sex tape he made with his ex-girlfriend, who has since become a huge TV star, just might have a way to pay for his wife's infertility treatments.

When Eddie sells his old video of Martha to an internet entrepreneur, he's not thinking about any consequences other than funding his and Susan's efforts to have a baby. He certainly never imagines that they'll lead to a high-risk pregnancy played out on social media and reality TV, or that his role of a lifetime will be an edited-for-broadcast version of himself.

Beha's sharp observations of crafted, carefully produced versions of private lives becoming public property resonate in an time when it sometimes feels like a life unexamined by other people isn't a life properly lived...or worth living, for that matter. Arts and Entertainments is indeed entertaining, but it's also a thoughtful examination of how we shape our own stories.

Book description, from the publisher's website

"Handsome Eddie" Hartley was once a golden boy poised for the kind of success promised by good looks and a modicum of talent. Now thirty-three, he has abandoned his dream of an acting career and accepted the reality of life as a drama teacher at the boys' prep school he once attended. But when Eddie and his wife, Susan, discover they cannot have children, it's one disappointment too many. 

Weighted down with debt, Susan's mounting unhappiness, and his own deepening sense of failure, Eddie is confronted with an alluring solution when an old friend-turned-Web-impresario suggests Eddie sell a sex tape he made with an ex-girlfriend, now a wildly popular television star. In an era when any publicity is good publicity, Eddie imagines that the tape won't cause any harm—a mistake that will have disastrous consequences and propel him straight into the glaring spotlight he once thought he craved. 

A hilariously biting and incisive takedown of our culture's monstrous obsession with fame, Arts & Entertainments is also a poignant and humane portrait of a young man's belated coming-of-age, the complications of love, and the surprising ways in which the most meaningful lives often turn out to be the ones we least expected to lead.

Opening lines:

"'You know who I saw on TV last night?' John Wilkins asked the small group of old friends surrounding him. 'Dr. Drake.'

"They'd been drinking in the St. Albert's library for less than half an hour. Eddie was surprised it had taken even that long for the name to come up.

"'The show's in syndication,' he said. 'It's on every day.'

"'Not Dr. Drake,' Wilkins clarified, as though the distinction should have been obvious. 'Martha. She was on Entertainment Daily talking about her new boyfriend, Rex Gilbert.'"

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Book Talk: BRUTAL YOUTH, by Anthony Breznican

Brutal Youth: A Novel
Anthony Breznican (Twitter) (Goodreads author page)
Thomas Dunne Books (June 10, 2014), Hardcover (ISBN 1250019354 / 9781250019356)

Fiction, 416 pages

A version of this review was previously published in Shelf Awareness for Readers (June 17, 2014). Shelf Awareness provided me with a publisher-furnished galley to facilitate the review, and compensated me for the review they received and posted.

Anthony Breznican's Brutal Youth is at first reminiscent of The Chocolate War, Robert Cormier's classic young-adult novel of bullying in a Catholic high school, but it soon establishes itself as a more broadly-focused--and darkly funny--fiction debut.

It's 1991, and St. Michael the Archangel High School in suburban Pittsburgh is in decline in every possible way: the building is crumbling, enrollment is dwindling, and after a frequently-bullied student snaps and terrorizes the campus one spring morning, the parish pastor has stepped up his not-so-secret campaign to have the school shut down by the end of next year. Father Mercedes intends to make St. Michael's principal, Sister Maria, pay for allowing the culture of student-on-student harassment--culminating in the annual Hazing Day picnic--that may have fostered the outburst; for her part, the principal believes that the school's hazing tradition actually fosters class morale. The cliquishness and jockeying for status that can be found at any high school are ramped up when the environment seems to sanction them, and at St. Michael's, where some faculty and staff are returned graduates still living out their adolescent dramas, they're not confined to the students.

Peter, Noah, and Lorelei meet on the first day of their freshman year at St. Michael's. While they soon unite to support each other against bullies of all stripes, they won't be able to hold together for long. Over the course of the year, each will be ostracized; by spring, one will rise as a school hero, one will find sympathetic acceptance for all the wrong reasons, and one will end up in a place far worse than St. Michael's.

Breznican leavens the bleakness of Brutal Youth's premise with sharp, darkly comic dialogue that feels authentic to his well-drawn characters, particularly the adolescents. This coming-of-age novel is fast-moving, unsettling, and blends sympathy and satire with surprising effectiveness.

Thanks to Macmillan Audio for providing an excerpt from the audiobook, read by Matthew Brown.

Insights from the author in a conversation with Caroline Leavitt, and in a Twitter conversation with me following this review's original publication in Shelf Awareness:

by Florinda Lantos Pendley Vasquez

a minute ago

tweetcon

a brief Twitter conversation with debut novelist (and Entertainment Weekly senior writer) Anthony Breznican

1. 
   

   Anthony Breznican@Breznican

   Thanks to @florinda_3rs for the fun BRUTAL YOUTH review on@ShelfAwareness. So glad you found humor in there! :) http://bit.ly/1ncPQ7u 

   18 HOURS AGO
   
2. 
   

   Florinda PVasquez@florinda_3rs

   @Breznican You're welcome--and I hope I was supposed to!@ShelfAwareness

   15 HOURS AGO
   
3. 
   

   Anthony Breznican@Breznican

   You definitely were! Some overlook that part, so your review made me very happy. @florinda_3rs @ShelfAwareness

   15 HOURS AGO
   

   REPLYRETWEETFAVORITE
4. 
   

   Florinda PVasquez@florinda_3rs

   .@Breznican Was I also supposed to get the Elvis Costello reference in the title? Because that was one reason I asked to review #BrutalYouth

   13 HOURS AGO
   
5. 
   

   Anthony Breznican@Breznican

   That's a bingo. :) "Now, there's a tragic waste of brutal youth ..." That whole @ElvisCostello album was a massive influence.@florinda_3rs

   13 HOURS AGO

Book description, from the publisher's website

With a plunging reputation and enrollment rate, Saint Michael’s has become a crumbling dumping ground for expelled delinquents and a haven for the stridently religious when incoming freshman Peter Davidek signs up. On his first day, tensions are clearly on the rise as a picked-upon upperclassmen finally snaps, unleashing a violent attack on both the students who tormented him for so long, and the corrupt, petty faculty that let it happen. But within this desperate place, Peter befriends fellow freshmen Noah Stein, a volatile classmate whose face bears the scars of a hard-fighting past, and the beautiful but lonely Lorelei Paskal —so eager to become popular, she makes only enemies. 

To even stand a chance at surviving their freshmen year, the trio must join forces as they navigate a bullying culture dominated by administrators like the once popular Ms. Bromine, their embittered guidance counselor, and Father Mercedes, the parish priest who plans to scapegoat the students as he makes off with church finances. A coming-of-age tale reversed, Brutal Youth follows these students as they discover that instead of growing older and wiser, going bad may be the only way to survive.

Opening lines:

"The kid had taken a lot of punishment over the years, so he had much to give back.

"A steel hatch on the roof of St. Michael the Archangel High School shuddered, then burst open, and the boy crawled out and collapsed against the gritty tarpaper surface, kicking the lid shut again with one sock-covered foot. He wore only his uniform gray slacks and a wide-open button-down shirt, streaked with blood that wasn’t his. A black canvas book bag hung over one shoulder, swinging back and forth as he scrambled to his knees. He pressed his weight against the closed hatch to stifle the hollering and pandemonium rising from beneath it.

"Next to the steel hatch was a bucket, steaming with hot tar. The janitor had been using it to seal sections of loose shingle that had been leaking water into the school during every springtime rainstorm. A grubby tar mop leaned against the bucket. The boy shifted his heavy bag and scooped up the mop, wedging it between the handles of the hatch, locking it shut. Then he fled back across the flat roof toward the ghostly concrete statues lining the edge.

"The row of saints had stood watch over St. Michael’s for as long as anyone alive could remember. Thomas, the doubter; Joseph, the foster father; Anthony, finder of lost things; Jude, devotee to the hopeless; Francis of Assisi, the lover of nature, who had a small concrete bird in his outstretched hand, and a real drip of birdshit on his concrete head. At the center archway of the ledge high above the school’s main entrance stood an even larger statue of a warrior angel, St. Michael himself, wings spread and sword raised against the satanic serpent being squashed beneath his foot.

"The boy on the roof was named Colin Vickler. Not that it mattered. This was the end. This was good-bye. There was nowhere else to hide."

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Book Talk: THE POSSIBILITIES, by Kaui Hart Hemmings

The Possibilities: A Novel
Kaui Hart Hemmings (Facebook) (Twitter)
Simon & Schuster (May 2014), Hardcover (ISBN 1476725799 / 9781476725796)
Fiction, 288 pages

A version of this review was submitted to Shelf Awareness for Readers, but was not published due to timing and space limitations. Shelf Awareness provided me with a publisher-furnished galley to facilitate the review, and compensated me for the review they received.

In her second novel, The Possibilities, Kaui Hart Hemmings again displays the gift for portraying believably messy families in remarkably picturesque settings that marked her 2007 debut, The Descendants. The setting is the snowy ski town of Breckenridge, Colprado rather than sunny Hawaii this time, but Hemmings continues to explore the idea that living in paradise doesn’t necessarily make life any easier.

Sarah St. John entered adulthood and motherhood at roughly the same time when she became a single parent at 21. As The Possibilities opens, three months after the death of Sarah’s 22-year-old son, Cully, in an accident on the mountain, she’s slowly discovering how life without him might look. She’s also learning things she never knew about his life through others who have lost him, including Cully’s father Billy, her own father Lyle, Cully's lifelong friend Morgan and Morgan’s mother Suzanne, Sarah’s best friend.

And then there’s Kit, who turns up at Sarah’s door offering to help shovel snow and leaves behind a datebook with notes in Cully’s handwriting. No one seems to know anything about Kit, but she seems to know them, and while it soon becomes evident just how well she knew Sarah’s son, the answer to that particular question raises a whole set of new ones.

The setup is more dramatic than the telling, and that makes The Possibilities affecting fiction. Hemmings’ style is low-key and straightforward, and the character interactions and dialogue feel true to prickly, complicated (and sometimes bizarrely funny) life. Every parent fears what Sarah has experienced, and her struggles with it are engaging, relatable, and moving. It’s been seven years since Hemmings’ promising debut; The Possibilities was worth the wait.

Book description, from the publisher's website:

In the idyllic ski town of Breckenridge, Colorado, Sarah St. John is reeling. Three months ago, her twenty-two-year-old son, Cully, died in an avalanche. Though single, Sarah is hardly alone in her grief. Her father, a retiree, tries to distract her with gadgets from the QVC home shopping channel. Sarah’s best friend offers life advice by venting details of her own messy divorce. Even Cully’s father reemerges, stirring more emotions and confusion than Sarah needs. Still, Sarah feels she is facing the stages of grief—the anger, the sadness, the letting go—alone. 

Barely ready to face the fact she will never again hear the swoosh of her son’s ski pants, or watch him skateboard past her window, Sarah is surprised when a strange girl arrives on her doorstep. Unexpected and unexplained, she bears a secret from Cully that could change all of their lives forever. 

Kaui Hart Hemmings highlights the subtle poignancies of grief and relationships in this stunning look at people faced with impossible choices in the wake of a tragedy. With the unsentimental and refreshingly wry style famous for presenting trouble in paradise in The Descendants, Hemmings in The Possibilities considers the difficult questions of what we risk to keep our loved ones close.

Opening lines:

"I pretend that I'm not from here. I'm a woman from Idaho, on vacation with friends. I'm a newlywed from Indiana. An unremarkable guest at the Village Hotel, exploring Breckenridge, Colorado, waiting for a valet to bring her rented car around. A drop of water falls on my head. I look up at the green awning and move so that I'm fully covered. A black Escalade blasting music enters the roundabout. The car is huge, and I expect someone huge to go with it, but out come three young boys--the driver, short, the passengers, tall--and the valet, also a young boy, wordlessly takes the driver's keys, hands him a ticket, and nods his head.

"My son, Cully, who used to work here as a valet just three months ago, told me that he hated to park cars for people his age, and I can see why."

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Book Talk: NEW LIFE, NO INSTRUCTIONS, by Gail Caldwell

New Life, No Instructions: A Memoir

Gail Caldwell (Facebook)

Random House (April 2014), Hardcover (ISBN 1400069548 / 9781400069545)

Nonfiction/memoir, 176 pages

A version of this review was previously published in Shelf Awareness for Readers (April 15, 2014). Shelf Awareness provided me with a publisher-furnished galley to facilitate the review, and compensated me for the review they received and posted.

Gail Caldwell's 2010 memoir, Let's Take the Long Way Home, explored the losses that defined her fifth decade: her parents, her best friend and her beloved Samoyed, Clementine. She came into her 60s determined to move on, including starting over with a new puppy. But living with and training an active young dog forced Caldwell to confront just how difficult "moving on" was becoming for her, in aphysical sense. Caldwell had been compensating for the effects of polio her entire life, and this was getting harder every day. New Life, No Instructions is the story of how she learned she didn't have to continue to compensate, and of how a common medical procedure enabled her to see her life, literally, from a new perspective.

Caldwell's medical history led her and her caregivers to an exotic explanation for her painful limp, poor balance, fatigue, and other symptoms; for years, they had been trying to address her issues as manifestations of the relatively rare Post-Polio Syndrome. In 2011, a new doctor identified her problem as something far more ordinary: her right hip had completely deteriorated--perhaps due to post-polio complications, but perhaps for completely unrelated reasons; she needed surgery to replace it, and which would also make both of her legs the same length for the first time in her life.

New Life, No Instructions is an affirming and hopeful reminder that sometimes the stories that we tell ourselves turn out to be wrong, but they can lead us to something very right. Caldwell's brief (under 200 pages) memoir of a year of unexpected midlife transformation is clear-eyed and plainspoken. She vividly conveys her sense of wonder and possibility at being in such a new place at such an unexpected time, and it's hard to resist being caught up in that feeling.

I read this memoir in the weeks leading up to my 50th birthday, and while I'm inclined to think it will especially resonate with Caldwell's midlife contemporaries (and fellow dog people), it's a worthwhile read for anyone who appreciates good writing...and the idea that change is always possible.

Book description, from the publisher's website

The Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author of Let’s Take the Long Way Home now gives us a stunning, exquisitely written memoir about a dramatic turning point in her life, which unexpectedly opened up a world of understanding, possibility, and connection. New Life, No Instructions is about the surprising way life can begin again, at any age.

Opening Lines

"Cambridge 2011 

"My first tip-off that the world had shifted was that the dogs looked lower to the ground. I dismissed the perception as a visual misread: Because I was on crutches and couldn't bend down to touch them, of course they seemed further away. Then a friend came to visit, a striking woman whom I'd always considered tall. She was standing across the living room, and I was smiling, happy to have her there, and I thought, Tink is small! And I never realized it before."

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Book Talk: EXODUS, by Deborah Feldman

Exodus: A Memoir
Deborah Feldman
Blue Rider Press (2014), Hardcover (March 25, 2014), ISBN 0399162771 / 9780399162770
Memoir, 304 pages

A version of this review was previously published in Shelf Awareness for Readers (4/8/2014). Shelf Awareness provided me with a publisher-furnished galley to facilitate the review, and compensated me for the review they received and posted.

In her 2012 memoir, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, Deborah Feldman chronicled her upbringing in the insular, fundamentalist Satmar sect of Orthodox Judaism and her flight from its practices with her young son. Twenty-three years old at the time she left her Brooklyn community, Feldman had a long new life ahead of her–and very little idea of what it would look like, or who she would be within it. In Exodus, she explores where the first few years of that journey have taken her, and the perspective she has acquired since it began.

While no longer considering herself Orthodox–and some responses to her earlier book suggest that the “rejection” is reciprocated–Feldman continues to identify herself as Jewish. However, she must work out what that will look like for her as she moves forward, and she decides that moving backward needs to be part of that process. Much of Exodus follows Feldman as she travels through Europe along the path of her Hungarian-born grandmother, a survivor of the concentration camps, working at coming to terms with the ways in which she herself could be called a survivor.

Exodus is a companion piece to Unorthodox, and while it’s not necessary to read both memoirs in chronological order, those who have read one will likely want to read the other, as they clearly inform each other. Exodus has the feel of a coming-of-age story, tracing the protagonist’s steps toward self-discovery. It meanders at times and feels somewhat unresolved in the end, leaving the reader with a sense that Feldman is still at the beginning of things, still searching and sorting out…but she’s not yet thirty, and that seems right.

Book description, via the publisher’s website:

In 2009, at the age of twenty-three, Deborah Feldman packed up her young son and their few possessions and walked away from her insular Hasidic roots. She was determined to forge a better life for herself, away from the rampant oppression, abuse, and isolation of her Satmar upbringing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Out of her experience came the incendiary, bestselling memoir Unorthodox and now, just a few years later, Feldman has embarked on a triumphant journey of self-discovery—a journey in which she begins life anew as a single mother, an independent woman, and a religious refugee.

In her travels, and at home, Feldman redefines her sense of identity—no longer Orthodox, she comes to terms with her Jewishness by discovering a world of like-minded outcasts and misfits committed to self-acceptance and healing. Inwardly, Feldman has navigated remarkable experiences: raising her son in the “real” world, finding solace and solitude in a writing career, and searching for love. Culminating in an unforgettable trip across Europe to retrace her grandmother’s life during the Holocaust, Exodus is a deeply moving exploration of the mysterious bonds that tie us to family and religion, the bonds we must sometimes break to find our true selves.

From Chapter One:

"There she is, just across the street, sulking on the stoop. Seven years old, skin pale almost to the point of translucence, lips pursed into a sullen pout. She stares gloomily at the silver Mary Janes on her feet, the tips of which catch the last rays of sunlight quickly fading behind the three-story brownstone. 

"She has been scrubbed and primped in preparation for Passover, soon to arrive. Her hair hurts where it’s been pulled too tight into a bun at the top of her head. She feels each strand stretching from its inflamed follicle, especially at the nape of her neck, where an early-spring breeze raises goose bumps on the exposed skin. Her hands are folded into the lap of her brand-new purple dress, with peonies and violets splashed wildly on the fabric, smocking at the chest, and a sash tied around the waist. There are new white tights stretched over her thin legs. 

“This little side street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, usually bustling with black-clad men carrying prayer books, is momentarily silent and empty, its residents indoors making preparations for the evening.”

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Book Talk: THE PERFECT SCORE PROJECT, by Debbie Stier

The Perfect Score Project: Uncovering the Secrets of the SAT
Debbie Stier (Twitter) (Facebook)
Harmony (February 25, 2014), Hardcover (ISBN 0307956679 / 9780307956675)
Nonfiction: memoir/self-help/education, 304 pages

A version of this review was previously published in Shelf Awareness for Readers (March 4, 2014). Shelf Awareness provided me with a publisher-furnished galley to facilitate the review, and compensated me for the review they received and posted.

The Perfect Score Project chronicles Debbie Stier’s year of exploring a variety of test preparation strategies as she sat for the SAT seven times, with the goal of learning how to help her son Ethan prepare for his own college-entrance exams. Stier knew that Ethan’s ability to obtain merit-based financial aid would depend on high scores on the standardized tests, but she didn’t know how to help him prepare for them. Her last experience with the SAT had been nearly thirty years earlier, and an extensive test-prep industry had sprouted since then. Ethan’s mom was going to have to do a lot of homework herself before Ethan got anywhere near the SAT.

Stier tried a different study method before each test, from personal tutoring to online learning to self-directed practice using official College Board materials. The Perfect Score Project discusses the pros and cons of them all, with the verdict on each method's effectiveness rendered by the test scores she got after using it. The book offers many helpful insights about the testing process to parents of the college-bound—few of whom are likely to go to Stier’s lengths, honestly—as well as to prospective test-takers themselves.

Stier’s own evaluation of her SAT experience weighs its effects on her personal growth and relationship with her son at least as heavily as her test scores, and the story in The Perfect Score Project rests in that. While what she did comes across at times as a particularly intense example of “helicopter parenting” and readers might not agree with either her tactics or her conclusions, she offers them some very useful information in a rather unusual package.

A more enthusiastic review of The Perfect Score Project from Vasilly at 1330v

Book description, from the publisher's website

The Perfect Score Project is both a toolbox of fresh college-prep tips and an amusing snapshot of parental love and wisdom colliding with teenage apathy.

It all began as an attempt by Debbie Stier to help her high-school age son, Ethan, who would shortly be studying for the SAT. Aware that Ethan was a typical teenager (i.e., completely uninterested in any test) and that a mind-boggling menu of test-prep options existed, she decided – on his behalf -- to sample as many as she could to create the perfect SAT test-prep recipe.

Debbie’s quest turned out to be an exercise in both hilarity and heartbreak as she took the SAT seven times in one year and in-between “went to school” on standardized testing. Here, she reveals why the SAT has become so important, the cottage industries it has spawned, what really works in preparing for the test and what is a waste of time.

From Chapter One:

"I’m a forty-eight-year-old mother of two teenagers, and this whole crazy 'perfect score project' started out as a scheme to rescue my kid from . . . sliding by. I thought maybe I could motivate Ethan to care about the SAT, just a little, if I climbed into the trenches myself.

"Initially, though, the number of test-prep options left me agog (over a million on Google). My original idea was to try out twelve different methods of test prep the year before Ethan would be taking his first SAT. But as I saw how vast and complicated the realm of SAT prep appeared to be, I kept adding layers to the idea. What was at first simply the notion of taking an official SAT at school with the kids mushroomed into a vow to take the test every time it was offered in 2011 (seven times in all). And I’d try out different locations for each test, which turned out to be a total of five. (I didn’t anticipate the issue of test centers booking up early and ended up having to repeat a few). I wanted to see if the location played any role in the test experience, so I chose schools ranging from an elite private school in the suburbs to an urban public school in the Bronx.

"My journey would start with the first SAT of 2011, on January 22, and Ethan would take his first SAT exactly one year after me--in January of 2012. We’d overlap in our preparation about halfway through the year because (a) juniors take the PSAT in the fall (October of 2011 for Ethan; SAT No. 5 for me), so he’d need to study; and (b) I know my son well enough to realize he does better with some spare runway to build momentum.

"In spite of the escalating nature of the project, I was excited about the 'study together' part and assumed that by halfway through the year, with four SAT experiences under my belt, I’d have my bearings and be able to adroitly show my son 'the SAT ropes.'"

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Book Talk: THE RACE UNDERGROUND, by Doug Most

The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway
Doug Most (Facebook) (Twitter)
St. Martin's Press (February 2014), Hardcover (ISBN 0312591322 / 9780312591328)
Nonfiction: history, 416 pages

A version of this post was previously published as a Starred Review in Shelf Awareness for Readers (February 18, 2014). Shelf Awareness provided me with a publisher-furnished galley to facilitate the review, and compensated me for the review they received and posted.

As industrial innovation and waves of immigration drove the dramatic 19th-century growth of New York and Boston, both cities needed to find new ways to move people around. Constrained by geography, they were running out of space for pedestrians, horses, carriages and street railways to coexist, and eventually, they looked in the same direction: below street level. In The Race Underground, Boston Globe editor Doug Most recounts the remarkable achievements in civil engineering that transformed two cities, along with the political and financial intrigues that accompanied them.

The Race Underground shifts its narrative between Boston and New York from one chapter to the next, and while Most doesn’t minimize the technological developments that made the subway possible, he’s more interested in the people responsible for bringing it to each city—and, sometimes, in the ones who stood in its way. The human-interest angle allows him to play up the competitive relationship between the Northeast’s two anchor cities as each tries to be first to take its transportation problems underground. (Spoiler: Boston does it sooner, but New York does it on a much bigger scale.)

As challenging as it can be to get around New York, Boston, and other major American cities where mass transit is part of everyday 21st-century life, it’s staggering to imagine what it might be like without it. (Actually, if you live in Los Angeles, you don't have to imagine very hard.) The Race Underground tells the story of how we got there, and it’s an enlightening—and surprisingly exciting—ride.

Book description, from the publisher's website: 

In the late nineteenth century, as cities like Boston and New York grew more congested, the streets became clogged with plodding, horse-drawn carts. When the great blizzard of 1888 crippled the entire northeast, a solution had to be found. Two brothers from one of the nation's great families—Henry Melville Whitney of Boston and William Collins Whitney of New York—pursued the dream of his city digging America's first subway, and the great race was on. The competition between Boston and New York played out in an era not unlike our own, one of economic upheaval, life-changing innovations, class warfare, bitter political tensions, and the question of America’s place in the world. 

The Race Underground is peopled with the famous, like Boss Tweed, Grover Cleveland and Thomas Edison, and the not-so-famous, from brilliant engineers to the countless "sandhogs" who shoveled, hoisted　and blasted their way into the earth’s crust, sometimes losing their lives in the construction of the tunnels. Doug Most chronicles the science of the subway, looks at the centuries of fears people overcame about traveling underground and tells a story as exciting as any ever ripped from the pages of U.S. history. The Race Undergroundis a great American saga of two rival American cities, their rich, powerful and sometimes corrupt interests, and an invention that changed the lives of millions.

From the Introduction:

"In the second half of the nineteenth century, the horse-pulled streetcar, clip-clopping along at five miles per hour and filled with an unbearable stench, slowly began to cripple two great American cities. In Boston and New York, there were too many people and no safe, reliable way for them to move from one neighborhood to the next. In the summer heat, carriages inched forward until the animals reared up their legs in frustration, and police had to come out swinging their clubs to restore peace. During the winter it was no better. Horses struggled to get their footing in the snow and ice and were driven to exhaustion or sometimes death. When a solution to the problem finally emerged--a subway--it was rejected time and again, either by corrupt politicians, selfish businessmen, or terrified citizens."

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Book Talk: ONE MORE THING, by B.J. Novak

One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories

B.J. Novak (Twitter)

Knopf (February 2014), Hardcover (ISBN 0385351836 / 9780385351836)

Fiction (short stories), 288 pages

A version of this review was previously published in Shelf Awareness for Readers (2/14/2014). Shelf Awareness provided me with a publisher-furnished galley to facilitate the review, and compensated me for the review they received and posted.

Actor/writer B.J. Novak (The Office) bucks the linked-short-stories trend in his first fiction collection, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories, but that doesn't mean the pieces here have nothing that unites them. While they lack recurring characters or common narrative threads, they have a consistency in tone, a similar worldview, and--perhaps not surprisingly, given Novak's background as a comedic writer and performer--a shared sense of humor.

Some of One More Thing's strongest stories are driven by character. "One of These Days" reunites three college friends with a mission to "do something" about the fourth member of their old group; a young boy is puzzled when his parents won't let him claim the prize he wins from a cereal company in "Kellogg's"; "J.C. Audetat" finds that his poetry is best expressed in translating the words of other writers. Others stand out conceptually: the hare tells his side of the story in "The Rematch" with the tortoise, and love always wins "The Best Thing in the World Awards"...except for that one time.

Many of One More Thing's short stories are very short--several run only a few lines--and even the longest barely reach twenty pages. However, word count has little to do with what makes them work.

Novaks' writing is intelligent but doesn't feel like it's trying too hard to be clever, and I was struck by a touch of sweetness mixed into the funny--there's a sense of compassion toward its subjects that gives the funny lines unexpected depth. Quite frankly, I expected more snark, and I'm glad Novak confounded that expectation.

I'm not generally a short-fiction fan, but this was "potato-chip reading"--I kept thinking I'd have just a few, but then I'd dig further and further into this engaging, imaginative collection of stories that are difficult to read just one at a time.

Book description, from the publisher's website:

A boy wins a $100,000 prize in a box of Frosted Flakes—only to discover that claiming the winnings might unravel his family. A woman sets out to seduce motivational speaker Tony Robbins—turning for help to the famed motivator himself. A new arrival in Heaven, overwhelmed with options, procrastinates over a long-ago promise to visit his grandmother. We meet Sophia, the first artificially intelligent being capable of love, who falls for a man who might not be ready for it himself; a vengeance-minded hare, obsessed with scoring a rematch against the tortoise who ruined his life; and post-college friends who try to figure out how to host an intervention in the era of Facebook. Along the way, we learn why wearing a red T-shirt every day is the key to finding love, how February got its name, and why the stock market is sometimes just . . . down.

Finding inspiration in questions from the nature of perfection to the icing on carrot cake, One More Thing has at its heart the most human of phenomena: love, fear, hope, ambition, and the inner stirring for the one elusive element just that might make a person complete. Across a dazzling range of subjects, themes, tones, and narrative voices, the many pieces in this collection are like nothing else, but they have one thing in common: they share the playful humor, deep heart, sharp eye, inquisitive mind, and altogether electrifying spirit of a writer with a fierce devotion to the entertainment of the reader.

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Book Talk: THE DAYS OF ANNA MADRIGAL, by Armistead Maupin

The Days of Anna Madrigal: A Novel

Armistead Maupin

Harper (January 2014), Hardcover (ISBN 0062196243 / 9780062196248)

Fiction, 288 pages

A version of this review was previously published in Shelf Awareness for Readers (January 24, 2014). Shelf Awareness provided me with a publisher-furnished galley to facilitate the review, and compensated me for the review they received and posted.

It may surprise you to know--it surprises me, when I think about it-- that I've re-read the original six novels in Armistead Maupin's long-running "Tales of the City" series more times than any other books in my adult life. I discovered it in my early twenties, and in addition to being thoroughly entertaining, it was a consciousness-raising experience for me. 

"Tales of the City" began as a serial in a San Francisco newspaper nearly forty years ago, and the series has retained a serial's ability to pull a reader into the story at any point. After nearly twenty years away from these characters, Maupin began revisiting them in 2007. The Days of Anna Madrigal is the ninth novel in the series and may truly be its finale, yet it's as good a place to start as any of the books that precede it.

Maupin's core group of characters--Michael, Mary Ann, Brian, and their landlady, Anna Madrigal--left their apartments at 28 Barbary Lane on San Francisco's Russian Hill long ago, but they've remained connected as what Anna describes as a "logical" (as opposed to biological) family. Biology, however, is staking a claim on Mrs. Madrigal now. Having surprised nearly everyone, including herself, by making it to the age of ninety-two, she's begun to feel an urgent need to deal with loose ends. Business she left unfinished decades earlier--when she fled her life as Andy Ramsey, the teenage son of the madam of the Blue Moon Lodge--is nagging at her. The entire logical family, including Michael's husband and Brian's thirtysomething bisexual daughter, will soon be off to the Nevada desert for a week at Burning Man, and the trip offers Anna the opportunity for a detour to Winnemucca and a visit to her past.

While much of The Days of Anna Madrigal explores Anna's Depression-era youth, Maupin also establishes the novel in the immediate present through details like Burning Man and references to current events and media. This specificity is a hallmark of the series; each novel is something of a time capsule, yet the stories feel timeless. Character is revealed and plot is advanced more through dialogue than description, and Maupin strikes a good balance in presenting just enough background to clarify the story for newcomers while rewarding longtime readers with new insights into characters they know and love. If The Days of Anna Madrigal really is the last of the "Tales of the City," the ending offers readers old and new the chance to revisit it all from the very beginning.

Book description, from the publisher's website:

The Days of Anna Madrigal, the suspenseful, comic, and touching ninth novel in Armistead Maupin’s bestselling “Tales of the City” series, follows one of modern literature’s most unforgettable and enduring characters—Anna Madrigal, the legendary transgender landlady of 28 Barbary Lane—as she embarks on a road trip that will take her deep into her past. 

Now ninety-two, and committed to the notion of “leaving like a lady,” Mrs. Madrigal has seemingly found peace with her “logical family” in San Francisco: her devoted young caretaker Jake Greenleaf; her former tenant Brian Hawkins and his daughter Shawna; and Michael Tolliver and Mary Ann Singleton, who have known and loved Anna for nearly four decades.

Some members of Anna’s family are bound for the otherworldly landscape of Burning Man, the art community in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert where 60,000 revelers gather to construct a city designed to last only one week. Anna herself has another destination in mind: a lonely stretch of road outside of Winnemucca where the 16-year-old boy she once was ran away from the whorehouse he called home. With Brian and his beat-up RV, she journeys into the dusty troubled heart of her Depression childhood to unearth a lifetime of secrets and dreams and attend to unfinished business she has long avoided.

Opening lines:

"Summer had been warmer than usual this year, but the heat that throbbed in the East Bay was already coaxing pale fingers of fog into the city. Anna could feel this on her skin, the chilly caress she had come to think of as "candle weather." She had not owned a fireplace since her landlady days on Russian Hill, but, to her mind, the proper application of candlelight carried all the primal comfort of a bonfire.

"She grabbed the purple plastic firelighter on the sideboard in the parlor. Her legs, however, weren't cooperating, so she steadied herself for a moment, slouching ludicrously on one hip. like Joan Crawford in forties gun moll mode. The thing in her wobbly hand was distinctly gun-like, complete with a trigger and a barrel.

"Mustn't think of it as a gun. Think of it as a wand."

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Book Talk: FRACTURES, by Lamar Herrin

Fractures: A Novel

Lamar Herrin

Thomas Dunne Books (November 2013), hardcover (ISBN 1250032768 / 9781250032768)

Fiction, 320 pages

A version of this review was previously published in Shelf Awareness for Readers (November 26, 2013). Shelf Awareness provided me with a publisher-furnished galley to facilitate the review, and compensated me for the review they received and posted.

The politics and economics of alternative energy are filtered through one family’s experience in Lamar Herrin’s Fractures. In one small town above the Marcellus Shale, retired architect Frank Joyner may be the last holdout against the oil-and-gas companies looking to set up their derricks and release the natural gas it contains from its deep underground pockets. Controversy over the potential environmental impact of hydrofracking and the disruptiveness of drilling operations haven’t deterred many of Frank’s neighbors from leasing their land to a developer, and his public statements of ambivalence haven’t endeared him to some of his community.

Although the decision to lease the Joyners’ hundred acres to a gas company ultimately rests with Frank, he’s getting competing messages and agendas from members of his family, and whatever choice he makes is likely to alienate someone. The Joyners have some experience with that, however, which become apparent as Herrin explores their complicated relationships with each other. There’s clearly love and good intentions between them, but the hurts and hostilities simmering underneath grow just as clear as the novel moves toward its stunning, tragic climax.

As the narrative perspective shifts between several characters, including Frank, his children Jen and Mickey, and gas-company landman Kenny Brewster, each of them develops into someone complex and convincing. Herrin is drawing a pretty obvious metaphor between family dynamics and fracking in Fractures, but it’s effective, and it’s rendered with such empathy and emotional honesty that readers may be reluctant to choose sides.

Book description, from the publisher’s website:
The Joyner family sits atop prime Marcellus Shale. When landmen for the natural gas companies begin to lease property all around the family’s hundred acres, the Joyners start to take notice. Undecided on whether or not to lease the family land, Frank Joyner must weigh his heirs’ competing motivations. All of this culminates as a looming history of family tragedy resurfaces.

A sprawling family novel, Fractures follows each Joyner as the controversial hydrofracking issue slowly exacerbates underlying passions and demons. With echoes of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Fractures takes its reader deep into the beating heart and hearth of a family divided.

Opening lines:

“On an April day in 1970, when most of his fellow architecture students were taking their spring break, Frank Joyner drew a Gillette razor blade across his left wrist with one express purpose in mind: he wanted to see if, when the blood appeared, he was willing to let it flow, or if, in fact, he wanted to live. On hand he had a stack of gauze pads, an Ace bandage, and a leather belt he’d tested on his forearm and then punched a new hole in that could serve as a tourniquet. In an anatomy book he’d checked out of the library, he’d read that the veins running down his wrist would yield, if cut, a dark blood, which would only ooze out, and that gauze pressed down beneath an Ace bandage would be sufficient to stop it. Flanking the veins and deeper set were the radial and ulnar arteries, and these would yield a bright red blood in a pulsating flow, which would take a tourniquet, in addition to the gauze and bandage, to stop. The arteries brought blood from the heart, oxygenated to that brighter red as it passed through the lungs; after its long, wearying trip through the body, the veins brought the blood back.

He’d intended to cut to the deeper and thicker-walled arteries, so that he would know, know for sure, but had in fact cut only to the depth of the veins, which had yielded a slow, blanketing flow more plum-colored than red, and which he’d contemplated for a while—impossible to say how long—before sighing deeply and applying the gauze and Ace bandage. He was twenty years old. Of course, he accused himself of cowardice in not cutting deeply enough to reach the arteries, but he also commended himself for not wasting time. He didn’t need the brighter, more youthful blood to tell him what the darker, more traveled blood had already made clear. He wanted to live.”

 

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