Medieval Bookworm

Miraflores always assumed that her Panaman father was a callous man who had an affair with her married mother and cared little about the child that resulted.  He has never called her, written to her, or made an effort to get involved in her life.  When her mother falls ill, Mira goes through her papers and discovers letters from her father, expressing his vibrant love for her mother and for Mira herself, even though he has never met her.  Torn by her realization, Mira lies to her mother and her mother’s new caregiver and flies to Panama City, determined to find the man who loved her mother so and fill in the missing pieces of her life.

This is a lovely, lovely book.  It’s carefully written in measured, beautiful prose, allowing the impact of the emotions that the characters are feeling to sweep the reader away more than telling us that it should.  The setting is gorgeous.  I could feel the warm breeze in Panama and the chill in Chicago’s winter.  I could see the Panama Canal for myself for the first time.

As Mira starts to peel away the secrets of her life, the book becomes more and more absorbing.  Meanwhile, she makes a very special friend in Panama who adds a bit of tension to the book.  We’re never sure what his intentions are or even what Mira’s intentions are.  They are united in a quest to find her father, but beyond that is a mystery and helps to propel the story along when the clues aren’t fast in coming.  It also sets up an interesting parallel between Mira and her mother once the truth is exposed.  History can only repeat itself if we let it happen.

Interspersed with the novel’s story are bits of scientific information about geography.  These are carefully chosen to reflect the emotions of the characters.  For example, the beginning of the novel has a description about the hardening of the earth’s core and its fiery heart; later we learn that one of the characters has become exactly like that over the course of her life.  We get a description of volcanoes when Mira nearly has a breakdown and can no longer control how she’s feeling.  I thought this was a really nice touch since Mira is an aspiring geologist herself.  It ties together Mira’s voice with science and with the story in a deeper way.

The questions this book asks, mostly through the relationship of Mira and Danilo, are similarly inspiring and relevant.  Mira struggles with questions of belonging in Panama; her father lived there and she wants to belong, even speaking Spanish, but she vascillates between feeling welcome and feeling different.  More than looking for her father, Mira is looking for herself and the half of her that she never had a chance to know.  With Danilo, she has cause to question how well they fit together and how any relationship, even a friendship, between them can work.  Their lives are different, but does that mean their future must also be different?

The World in Half is a wonderful, thoughtful book.  I loved Mira and I wanted her to find her father and the happiness that she deserves.  The ending is left open, but I liked it better that way.  Life is unpredictable and we already know the path Mira would choose if she had a choice.  I very strongly recommend this book.

This book is available from Amazon and Amazon UK.

Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet is a twelve-year-old genius living on a farm in the midwest.  His mother, Dr. Clair, is a scientist searching for a rare beetle.  His father is a farmer and cowboy.  T.S. likes to think of himself as a mapmaker.  He doesn’t just draw maps of land, though, he draws maps of everything from facial expressions to gunshots.  One day, he takes a phone call from the Smithsonian Institute and discovers that he has been selected for the prestigious Baird award, for which his friend Dr. Yorn has nominated him.  That phone call prompts T.S. to sneak on trains in his quest to get to Washington, D.C., to give a speech and accept his award.  Along the way, he meets a number of strange characters and makes a series of important realizations about his life, his age, and most importantly, his family.

I’m not sure there are words to describe how I felt about this book.  I haven’t seen many blog reviews around and I’m really wondering why.  This book is phenomenal.  T.S. is a stunning character.  He is clearly a genius but clearly a child at the same time; he makes amazing conclusions but then his child-logic can’t always keep up with his scientific mind.  I found this fascinating.  I’m no genius, but I truly felt that with T.S. I was having a peek into the mind of someone like Stephen Hawking, although much more understandable.

This book isn’t for people who dislike footnotes, though.  Me, I love footnotes, and this book is full of them, although usually on the sides, along with T.S.’s maps and observations.  In my opinion, these little asides added immeasurably to the main story even if they required me to read a little bit slower.  They flesh out this little boy’s world and show us how he works, who he is friends with, and sometimes illuminate larger questions in the novel; for example, his facial diagrams allow us to see the way his father appears when he looks at T.S. in a way that words could not really match.  The maps allow us to slowly feel the depths of pain which T.S. has been experiencing since his brother, Layton, killed himself; so much is revealed in that sibling relationship not through words, but through the implied sharing and affection in certain maps and footnotes.  My favorite of all of the asides, though, was probably the three-prong diagram of why McDonald’s appeals to adolescent boys.

I also really, really loved the backstory behind T.S.’s family which is covered towards the middle of the book in sections which were from a notebook T.S. stole from his mother.  Having had no inkling of his mother’s writing talent, T.S. is startled to discover that she has been writing a novel of the life of one of his ancestors.  I loved this story-within-a-story, both because it felt like historical fiction, my favorite genre, and because it revealed so much to T.S. about his mother, who has many more secrets than she lets on.  I can’t say that it moved the plot forward, but I never minded at all.

In the end, this was a wonderful, quirky, endearing story about a boy who figures out what his family means to him and, in the meantime, starts to grow up on his journey east.  It might not be for everyone, considering the lengthy footnotes and digressions from the main plot, but I loved every minute, especially after T.S. sets off.  I was in the mood for an ambitious story and I certainly got one.  I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

This book is available from Amazon and Amazon UK.  I also highly recommend checking out the book’s website.  It’s very cool and may give you a better insight into the book’s personality.  If you have already, it has just been updated, with a special song written just for T.S.’s sister Gracie, so it’s definitely worth another look!

From the back cover:

On a train filled with quietly sleeping passengers, a young man’s life is forever altered when he is miraculously seen by a blind man.  In a quiet town, an American teacher who has lost her Japanese lover to death begins to lose her own self.  On a remote road amid fallow rice fields, four young friends carefully take their own lives – and in that moment they become almost as one.  In a small village, a disaffected American teenager discovers compassion after a strange encounter with an enigmatic red fox, and in Tokyo, a girl named Love learned the deepest lesson about its true meaning from a coma patient lost in dreams of an affair gone wrong.

From the neon colors of Tokyo, with its game centers and karaoke bars, to the bamboo groves and hidden shrines of the countryside, these souls and others mingle, revealing a profound tale of connection – uncovering the love we share without knowing.

Wow.  This is exactly the book I was looking for when I picked it up.  This really is an unbelievably beautiful tale of the connections between people and how all of our stories intertwine in the most meaningful of ways, while invoking Japanese culture with which I was unfamiliar but which suits these quiet stories perfectly.  It’s almost like an interconnected book of short stories in which each builds upon the next, returning to some characters and not others.  Each strand of the novel shows us a particular aspect of love and when woven together, form a stunning tapestry and a beautiful book.

At first, I was perplexed when between chapters, the book switched narrators and from 1st to 3rd person.  In the next chapter, it switched again.  So it took me a little while to realize how this book was structured, and some chapters do have an adjustment period of their own.  Often the connections between characters aren’t explicit and are slowly revealed through clues, which I liked a lot; a chapter halfway through the book will mention characters from the first, for example.

This book also contains a little bit of magical realism.  Deceased appear as ghosts to those whom they loved.  There are Japanese curses and even what seems to be a shape-shifting fox.  All of it fits, though, and I found made the novel even richer with culture than it would have been otherwise.

Is this a sad novel, given that a few of the stories focus on suicide and many on death?  In some ways, yes.  It’s even deeper than that, though, as it shows us how many people from all different walks of life can feel the exact same thing without realizing it.  That’s where the title comes in; all these people share love without knowing.  I can’t say it made me sad, though.  It made me thoughtful and it astonished me with its power.

I loved this book.  I’m so grateful to author Christopher Barzak for sending me this copy and I sincerely hope that he gains a wider audience.  This may be my favorite book so far this year.  It’s one of those quietly stunning books that I fall in love with every single time.  As a result, I would recommend it to everyone.

Buy The Love We Share Without Knowing on Amazon.

Edward Meopian’s life is never easy.  His mother dies before he goes to high school and his father has a hard time expressing his love.  Edward is uncomfortable at school and it only gets worse when his father enters him into a prestigious private institution with the kids of famous people, especially given that he doesn’t even know how to tie his tie.  Edward learns, though, and through this book we follow his life, through college, love affairs, strange jobs, and even fatherhood.

One thing I have loved in reading many of Mr. Meeks’ stories is the humanity of his characters.  You can always feel for these people.  In this novel, Edward is no exception, and in fact, he echoes the experience of many.  He remains in the background for most of his early years, struggling with bullying and confusion over girls, especially given his raging adolescent hormones.  Through college, he decides what he wants to be, but the path there isn’t easy or conventional.  While on his unexpected detours, Edward figures out who he is and begins to achieve, but he still isn’t perfect, because no one can be.  This book echoes the unpredictability of life in a way that will resonate with anyone who has ever been a little lost.  I also think the time gaps were handled very well in this novel.  For obvious reasons, we skip ahead every so often, but it was very easy to know how much time had passed and I never felt I was missing out on anything.

I think I was most amused by Edward’s adolescent years, particularly his struggle with girls.  He doesn’t understand them at all but is mainly fixated on sex in a very believable teenage way.  I’ll admit that I found this section hilarious.  I can’t know what goes in the mind of a teenage boy, but I suspect the author has a better idea.

Overall, I enjoyed very much reading about the ups and downs of Edward Meopian’s fictional life.  Christopher Meeks captures life’s unpredictability while retaining a message of the hope that inspires us all.  I’m very pleased to say that I highly recommend this book.  I think we can all find a little bit of ourselves in Edward.

Buy The Brightest Moon of the Century on Amazon.