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 By no fault of his own, twelve-year-old Jack is one of the most ostracized boys in town, and all because of his last name. The Witcher family are considered white trash, and even though Jack is smart, fair, and honest, he is tarred by the same brush that affects all his family. It’s harder for sensitive Jack, who has to deal with all of the follies of adolescent life at the same time he’s shunned by the people who he longs to be friends with. The fact that his brother is suspected of murder doesn’t help. How can Jack reconcile his feelings for his family with his longing to be accepted for once in his short life?
If Jack’s in Love may be the first Amy Einhorn book that I didn’t outright fall in love with myself. Not that it’s a bad book, really; it was fine, and I enjoyed reading it, but it wasn’t that compelling or earth-shaking for me. I was easily able to put it down and come back to it later, and as I read it a while before I wrote this review, parts of it have faded quickly from my mind, so I’m afraid I didn’t find it all that memorable, either.
But there were certainly parts that I did enjoy – for instance, I liked Jack’s character, although the rest of them I was happy to take or leave, and I found the perspective of his struggle to be really interesting. He’s on the inside of a classic “white trash” family, but he sympathizes with both them, especially his mother, and the family whose son has disappeared. It’s seeing two halves of the coin which draws me in to books like this, and which also makes me a little more disappointed that I didn’t find myself loving it.
The book is set in the American south in the 60′s and 70′s, so there are also hints of the racial divide; for instance, Jack’s father is friends with a black man who lives in a certain district, and Jack’s older Jewish friend Gladstein lives in the same place. But that’s about the extent of these tensions; Jack’s love for Myra, the murdered boy’s younger sister, dominates most of the book. This is the part where the book really fell down for me; I didn’t like their romance much at all, and I didn’t believe in them as a couple no matter how young. There were too many barriers, and while a good book would be all about knocking those down, I wasn’t feeling it here.
Anyway, many others have enjoyed this book considerably more than I have; visit the Book Blogger Search Engine for many more reviews. While If Jack’s in Love had its moments, I ultimately found it to be disappointing; regardless, I’ll be looking out for Wetta’s further work as he has a lot of potential.
I purchased this book.
 Margaret Prior’s spinsterhood is about to be thrown into glaring relief. Her sister is getting married and her brother has long been wed to Margaret’s friend Helen. As a lady, living in Victorian London, it’s considered an excellent idea for her to devote her time to charitable works. She’d once hoped to spend that time helping her father with his studies, but on his death, her choices have narrowed. She chooses to become a Lady Visitor to Millbank Prison, hoping that her visits will cheer up the inmates. At the prison, she meets Selina Dawes, a spiritualist medium who captivates Margaret almost immediately. As Margaret’s fixation with Selina grows stronger, she begins to fantasize about freeing her, and experiencing a life she’d thought long beyond her reach.
I’ve been thinking about this book ever since I read it – it’s wrapped its way into my head and hasn’t left yet. Sarah Waters never fails to disappoint me with thoughtful, intense books that provide excellent stories, well-rounded characters, and real issues that hover about in my head.
Let’s start with the spiritualist nature of the book, and of Selina herself. Victorians were incredibly keen on ghosts and talking with people who had passed on. In the book I just reviewed, Arthur and George, Julian Barnes also sees Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in this light, a little bit, but Affinity naturally goes into much more depth. Like Waters’s later book, The Little Stranger, this novel plays with the extent to which we can believe in characters who experience phenomena that is beyond their understanding. Selina sends Margaret flowers and locks of her hair, and seems to know far more about Margaret than is possible. Nurtured in that atmosphere, it’s easy for Margaret to believe in everything Selina tells her, which I think reflects the relatively common Victorian attitude to acceptance of the supernatural in their everyday lives.
Margaret also has to deal with the difficult reality of being a lesbian in a world that doesn’t really acknowledge their existence. I mean – we have trouble with this today, and over 100 years ago, the situation was much worse. Her first love, Helen, rejected her for the more traditional route of marriage to man – Margaret’s own brother. Now, Margaret is bereft, between the loss of her beloved father and her lover, leaving a massive gap that a girl like Selina could much more easily enter. After all Margaret’s been through, she’s longing for that love, that acceptance.
The story also alternates with Selina’s life before the prison, so we can learn a little bit about how she got there in the first place. Together with Margaret’s story, these two halves combine to make the final twist come to life as we understand it. That twist is something I sort of anticipated, given I’d been warned by Ana that the book was sad, but I didn’t understand what was going to happen until, finally, it did. It is incredibly effective and well done, regardless. I loved the way the book came together with everything making perfect sense – I don’t mind open endings, but there is something satisfying about a book that tells you where you stand.
Well-constructed, with excellent characters and spectacular atmosphere, this is a book that is well worth your time.
 Arthur and George are born in Great Britain in the mid-19th century, but their lives couldn’t be any more different. Arthur grows up in Edinburgh, in a shabby but intellectual and loving family, becoming an eye doctor and then a world-famous author. George grows up in rural Shropshire, tortured by farmboys due to his dark Indian skin, but nevertheless persevering to become a published solicitor in Birmingham. George is one of many; Arthur is one in a million. But when George’s life begins to unravel completely, it is Arthur who must come to his rescue, in this deep exploration of race, prejudice, circumstance, and deeply-held beliefs.
Julian Barnes recently won the Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending, which I immediately wanted to read, but since I had Arthur and George on my shelf, I decided it had to come first. To be honest with you, that was a brilliant decision, because I loved this book. It made me think on so many levels, while at the same time providing a cleverly told story set in a fascinating part of history.
The short description I wrote about probably makes it obvious that the Arthur is question is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ridiculously famous for creating Sherlock Holmes, a figure who resonates with us still so strongly that he’s having films and revival novels made about him. He’s less famous for his efforts to reform the law and grant justice to the wrongly accused. One of those cases was that of George Edalji, who is naturally the George in this book. Wrongly convicted of a series of horse murders and threatening letters, even though the letters threatened his own family and the mutilations continued when he couldn’t have committed them, George winds up in prison, and sends a letter to the author of the famous detective stories for help. Luckily for us – and Julian Barnes – Arthur came to help.
Knowing that this was a true story gave it particular resonance for me. The letters quoted within are real letters, including the threatening ones sent to George’s family. What was recorded has been included. Barnes has instead stepped into the minds of the characters and explored what these people might have been thinking and feeling.
In particular, this is a deep exploration of the injustice that was once inherent in the criminal system, but which invites us to work out our own prejudices in the process. We may not condemn George for his half-Indian heritage now, as these Englishmen did, but who do we accuse in his place? I’ll let you read the book to consider this for yourself, as Arthur must when he studies the suspects, but it’s the sort of book to place a reader just slightly on edge, fervently aware of how much and how little has changed.
It’s also an incredibly fascinating case study of two completely different men, who might have grown up in two different worlds, but for the cozy feel of England that seems to steep the book in tradition while carefully probing at these stereotypes that we’re still working to smash. I was kept reading, eager to learn more, and I found both halves of the narrative equally consuming, even before the central characters finally meet. It’s completely engrossing, beautifully written, and convincingly fleshed out. Very highly recommended – thank you, Julian Barnes, for getting my 2012 reading year off to a fantastic start.
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 Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli begin their lives together with an arranged marriage and a move to the United States from India. Ashoke is still a student, with ambitions to become a professor, while Ashima stays home to take care of their son, Gogol, who is born shortly after their marriage. The Namesake is really about Gogol, who sits between the generations, watching the effect his life has on his immigrant parents even as he tries to sort out his own culture, to reconcile his Bengali roots with his American present.
I’ve been hearing about Jhumpa Lahiri for years, and actually I’ve owned this book since 2008. Shameful, I know, especially because once I got started reading this I completely fell in love. It wasn’t a hard task to win me over; Lahiri managed it almost immediately by tying Gogol, the Russian author, to the story in the form of Gogol, the character, adding in a whole range of meaning for me as a reader of that particular author. I loved how the author followed the character throughout his life, subtly reminding him of his parents, and simultaneously making him confused and guilty and a little bit wistful.
I’m an immigrant myself, and though not nearly as isolated as Ashoke and Ashima, I still sympathised with the feeling of being in a foreign land, lacking friends simply because you have no basis for knowing people, and essentially feeling isolated. The couple eventually make themselves at home, but there’s always something there that is lacking, even once you realize that you’ve lived in a foreign place for long enough that you’ll never quite fit in at home, either.
The contrast between the experience of the parents and the children when they visit India, for instance, is striking. Though Ashoke and Ashima are happy enough in the United States, they come back to themselves in India. In vivid contrast, their children feel irritated at the absence from home and confused by a different way of life. They don’t enjoy the visits, but their parents relish them and despair at leaving.
This is also a novel about identity, about the confusion between who you individually are and where you’ve come from. Gogol, in typical young adult fashion, seems to discard everything about his culture, including his own name, in a search to figure out who he truly is. It takes a powerful shock to remind him that there’s more to his background, that there are essential threads of his life that he just missed while he was busy asserting that identity. But he quickly swings back the other way. It’s not a simple thing, working out who you are and entangling it from the mess created of your life up to that point, and Lahiri not only recognizes this but pulls it off beautifully.
A quiet but powerful book about identity and heritage, The Namesake struck every chord correctly with me, catapulting itself onto my 2011 favorites list at the tail end of the year. Very highly recommended.
 The affair between Adele Hugo, Victor Hugo’s wife, and Charles Saint-Beuve has gone down in history as a mistake made by everyone; a doomed love affair that simply never should have started. Chock full of details that only history can make believeable, like Saint-Beuve’s hermaphroditism and cross-dressing, and the intoxicating world of 19th century France, the book is really a love story about two people who have made mistakes but have never ceased longing for one another.
I knew I wanted to read another book by Humphreys after Coventry and she certainly hasn’t let me down here. The book is short, but it covers thirty years of the couple’s affair, even after one of them has passed on. We alternate between Adele’s and Saint-Beuve’s voices, witnessing their struggles to be together from both sides. Adele, obviously, cannot leave her husband, who grows increasingly famous, particularly because of her children, while Saint-Beuve struggles to become the man he longs to be in Victor’s ever-present shadow.
I had actually never heard of the affair between Saint-Beuve and Adele, but since reading this book have really come to realize that it was well known in its time and almost universally derided. Saint-Beuve in particular has borne the brunt of the ridicule, possibly because he was actually a hermaphrodite.
This makes for a very interesting book, but instead of making it seem at all vulgar or strange, Humphreys weaves it into his personality and makes his cross-dressing and his confusion sexually just another aspect of him, just like his desire to write is a part of him but does not define him. I thought this was an incredibly sensitive way to handle the subject and Humphreys does an extraordinary job, both with his personality and the way that Adele sees him and falls in love with him and is physically attracted to him despite things like cross-dressing which would immediately put off many straight women in the present.
Another aspect of the book that I really enjoyed, which I briefly alluded to above, is Saint-Beuve’s struggle to define himself. He virtually lives in Victor’s shadow – struggling to surpass Victor’s writing skills, falling in love with his wife, and even at times coveting Victor’s children. He tries so hard to set himself apart, but is all he really wants to be Victor. It’s a real struggle with individuality.
Humphreys is a beautiful writer and her words set nineteenth-century Paris alight. The atmosphere, especially when the couple are together, is wonderful and immediately grants us a sense of place.
A lovely, tender but sad read, The Reinvention of Love is the perfect choice for those who prefer their literary fiction set in the past with a whole heap of doomed romance.
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 It only takes a minute for Emmy’s life to flip upside down; her baby, the spot of joy in her life, stolen, her husband accusing her of the crime. After she goes on a frantic search, Emmy ends up in a mental hospital, longing for her stolen daughter and for justice. In the present day, fourteen-year-old Sophie is hidden from the world, forbidden to do so much as leave her house. She and her mother have constantly been hiding, but Sophie has never understood why. When she befriends her neighbor, a boy called Joey, Sophie begins to put the pieces of her life together and wonder. Told in alternating chapters between the two women, You Are My Only is the story of a mother’s love and a daughter’s longing.
Beth Kephart is a beautiful writer; I first experienced her wonderful style in Nothing But Ghosts and I’ve been looking forward to another read since. She has the incredible talent of getting right to the heart of human emotion and expressing it through her prose while telling a story. Some of the imagery is simply stunning, causing me to go back and read over again just to savor the beauty of the words. As you might expect, then, the point of this book is not the plot, though; it’s easy to see from the outset what exactly has happened.
Instead the book is a slow discovery, watching the characters, especially Sophie, work out what’s happened and how their lives have become like this. It’s also very much a tale about motherhood. Each of the adult women is a mother in different ways – Emmy, whose daughter has been stolen; Sophie’s mother, who craved a child; Joey’s aunts, who are perhaps the most traditionally “motherly” characters in the book despite their somewhat unconventional life. And in the center is Sophie, seeking a vision of motherhood she hasn’t had, and an opportunity to escape the stifling confines of her house and enjoy the life of an ordinary young girl. All of the characters are seeking something, and the heart of the book lies in whether or not they find it, and how they go about looking for it.
I do believe Kephart’s works should be read much more widely, and this wouldn’t be a bad place to start for any reader. Her books are lovely, evocative and full of pure emotion. I’d recommend both this and Nothing But Ghosts, and I’m very much looking forward to reading more of her work.
All book links to external sites are affiliate links. I received this book for free for review from Netgalley.
 World War II had a massive effect on lives across the world; Silvana and Janusz, living in war zones, have been affected more than most. Separated at the very beginning of the war as a young married couple with a small son, Janusz immediately joins the army while Silvana is left in Warsaw with their son Aurek. Soon forced to flee the city, Silvana and Aurek hide in the woods, while Janusz eventually finds himself in England as a veteran. Six years after their separation, they’re reunited and start family life in a small house in Ipswich, but both have changed, and both have damaging secrets they’re determined to keep.
22 Britannia Road has received a great deal of acclaim on its release, so I was expecting quite a lot from this novel. World War II stories are everywhere these days, so it does take something special or a different perspective to help a book stand out from the crowd. With its post-war story told simultaneously with the immediate history leading up to the war and afterwards, along with its Polish characters, the book easily accomplishes that much, providing a new family perspective on the hardships endured during the war.
Silvana and Janusz’s reunion is uneasy; they barely remember what one another look like. Everything in their lives has changed. For Aurek, things are even more difficult and confusing, as he simply doesn’t remember his father and just wants to go live with his mother in the woods again. He has no concept of society, much less that required by the strict British school system and, partly, his father, who wants a son to be proud of.
One of the most interesting aspects of the book was actually Aurek’s reaction to other children, school, his father, and so on; it demonstrates the adaptability of children as much as it shows how much adults struggle to accept the same tasks. Oddly, in this way it reminded me of Room by Emma Donoghue, even though the subject matters diverge wildly.
And then, of course, there are the secrets, which have the potential to destroy the family’s newly forged life. Complicating things are people who thrust themselves into the Nowaks’ newly forged lives, like Aurek’s first friend Peter and his elegant father. Silvana is a character that is difficult to understand, with her complicated past, while I think Janusz longs for the life that will be familiar to most readers; a promotion, a son to be proud of, a wife who loves him, a shiny new car. The opening scenes of the book, when he paints his house worrying what his stranger wife and child will appreciate, while reminiscing about the woman he’s fallen in love with in France, were actually some of the most poignant for me in the entire book.
While, for me, 22 Britannia Road wasn’t earth shattering, it was a book that certainly shed another light on life during and after World War II, particularly for immigrants. And it’s a worthy look into the minds of both adults and children who have to deal with the nearly unimaginable happening thanks to the horrors of war. Recommended.
All book links to external sites are affiliate links. I received this book for free from Amazon Vine.
 Irene and Nate Stanley move to Oregon in search of a better life for themselves and their family. Irene is reluctant to leave her extended family, but believes in the hope that her husband gives her. Instead, what they get is a seemingly random housebreaking and the death of their son, Shep. The murderer Daniel Robbin is caught, but the death of a child is something that neither can really cope with – driving away their daughter, Bliss, and launching life-changing consequences for the family.
This was one of the first books I bought for my Kindle nearly a year ago, and all this time it’s simply sat there unread – a book that, like so many, loses its luster once acquired. Luckily, I was travelling and had nothing on me but the Kindle, so when everything else ALSO seemed to lose appeal (don’t we all hate it when that happens?) I finally opened this title and started to read. I’m glad I did – this was a powerful book with a surprise twist at the end that I hardly expected, but which really added to the strength of the entire book.
The novel is told through alternating viewpoints. Most of the book is from Irene’s perspective as she loses her son, with the occasional chapter from Bliss, and the rest of the book is told by Tab Mason, the man who has been ordered to kill Daniel Robbin. Robbin has been on death row for years and Tab has never been the one to actually kill a man, nor is he comfortable with it. This perspective provides a really fascinating and heartbreaking look into the toll the death penalty takes on the people who are actually required to follow through with it.
The main thrust of the storyline, though, is Irene’s personal struggle with the murder of her son and the incredibly difficult pain she has to go through as a mother. She essentially dies inside – at first, she lives for the fact that her son’s murderer is going to be killed, until she decides to forgive him on what would have been Shep’s 25th birthday. She writes him a letter and, surprisingly and secretly, she and Daniel begin corresponding. This leads to the biggest twist in the book, which I obviously won’t spoil for you. It’s a fascinating meditation on the power of forgiveness, though, and the strength of a mother’s love.
For a book I wasn’t actually sure I’d like after I bought it, The Crying Tree was a powerful surprise, and certainly one I’d recommend to those who aren’t afraid of tackling more difficult issues in their reading.
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 Octavia Frost, a fairly ordinary novelist, has just written her most depressing book to date. Her new book, though, The Nobodies Album, is something completely different – she is rewriting the endings to all of her previous books. It’s perfectly apt for this time in her life, as she wishes many parts of her life could have turned out differently. She can’t begin restitution, however, until she hears shocking news: her rock star son Milo, from whom she has been estranged for years, has been accused of murdering his girlfriend. Octavia immediately flies to his home in California, not knowing what to expect, but ready for a change in her life and to support her son in the most difficult time of his. Interspersed with her story are the endings of all the books she’s written, along with their new chapters, shedding ever-increasing light on the changing state of Octavia’s emotions and outlook on life.
Despite the fact that it’s billed as a literary mystery, I found The Nobodies Album surprisingly satisfying. It’s true that the mystery wasn’t particularly mysterious; there is really only one person who has any motive for murdering Milo’s girlfriend Bettina, so even I, notoriously slow when it comes to solving these things, figured it out before the characters did. But I quite enjoyed the story along the way. Many of the other story elements aren’t revealed until further into the book, so it takes a while to truly understand how they have all gotten to this point. Seeing things from Octavia’s point of view, as an older woman who has made mistakes, tied in with the obvious change of attitude she’s had displayed through the old book endings spread throughout the story, made for a very emotive and moving read.
Though beautifully written, Octavia’s voice is slightly cold to start. I would encourage you to set that aside until the story gets more involved. She has reasons for acting the way that she does, and those reasons lead to the reveal of some fascinating, complex relationships – exactly what I look for in a book like this. The story takes a close look in particular at the relationships between mothers and their children; how even doing the best you can sometimes isn’t quite enough, especially not in the formative years. It’s true that Octavia and Milo have some terrible circumstances to deal with, but she realizes that their personalities – which are very similar – will clash while their lives are still normal. She isn’t the kind of parent Milo needs, but she’s the parent he has left, which leads to problems in their relationship that eventually result in their initial estrangement.
The Nobodies Album is a thoughtful and at times suspenseful literary mystery. Highly recommended to those who enjoy well-written characters and don’t mind the occasional break for another thread of the story.
I am an Amazon Associate. I received this book for free for review from LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
 Martin is a thief, but he isn’t an ordinary thief. He meticulously studies his victims – who he calls clients – before he steals from them, to ensure that they don’t have any danger factors and that he won’t get caught by a dog or a child home sick from school. He starts to feel that he knows his clients based on the items he takes from them – from one, he’ll steal some laundry detergent and a packet of nearly expired tomatoes, while from another he’ll nab toothpaste or a box of pasta. His big operations take months of planning and he does his best to take things that his clients won’t miss for long periods of time. But when he gets trapped in one of his clients’ homes and starts to believe he can help them, Martin finds that his life of crime may turn into an attempt to be a guardian angel for his clients.
This was a startlingly original and often delightful read. Who could imagine that a thief could be so lovable? It helps that he hardly ever steals anything actually worth money, and when he does he takes extra effort to ensure its owners will never miss it. Instead, he seems to consider his clients as friends. He’s a peculiar character to start; he’s obsessed with mapping out houses and following his routines. He thinks he’s gone on dates with a woman at the local diner when she’s just being friendly, and has a single friend to his name. He works at a coffee shop and tells the people that he knows that he writes technical manuals rather than divulging his real career. He seems as though he might have happily gone along continuing to steal from his clients for years, until he realizes that maybe he can use his intimate knowledge of them for good rather than for his own personal gain.
In some respects, I think making it so easy to relate to him trivializes the fact that he is actually stealing, but this is a minor note and is completely contradicted by the good he actually ends up doing. Since we spend over 100 pages following him on his travels, we get a really good idea of what he actually steals and how he goes about doing it. Still, somehow, we appreciate and start to like him even as he describes his meticulous process of removing fingerprints and approaching houses from a variety of methods. It’s after we’ve known him that the book takes off – things start to go wrong and Martin has to cope with not only dangers but unfamiliar environments he isn’t prepared for. I didn’t feel anxious for his clients as he investigated, I felt anxious for him.
Something Missing completely delivers on its unusual premise with a fantastic main character as well as an intense and addicting storyline. This sweet read is highly recommended.
I am an Amazon Associate. I received this book for free for review from the publisher.
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