Race Across the Sky by Derek Sherman

Race Across the Sky is the story of two brothers.  The elder, Caleb, was once a well-off successful consultant in New York City who abandoned his life to join a mountain commune dedicated to ultramarathoning.  The younger, Shane, is changing careers from pharmaceutical salesman to biotech salesman as he and his wife are expecting their first child.  Caleb has found solace in severing all ties with the outside world, including his family, to live a regimented life of running with the commune under the leadership of the radical Mack, that is, until a young mother shows up seeking healing for her sick child.  Caleb does the forbidden and falls in love with June, and soon his carefully structured life is crumbling beneath his new love.  When he asks Shane for help finding a cure for June's terminally ill baby, Lily, both brothers embark upon a dangerous journey upon which hinges life and death.  

I had mixed feelings about Race Across the Sky.  On the one hand, Sherman has crafted what I found to be a startlingly unique book delving into two subjects that interest me greatly that haven't turned up in much fiction that I've read.  Sherman's glimpse into the world of ultramarathon running is fascinating.  I've always wondered what makes a runner want to participate in such a punishing sport, and Caleb's life offers an interesting perspective on that and what happens when it's taken to far by Mack and becomes downright cultish.  At the same time, Sherman tackles the field of genetic research, revealing a world where there are diseases that can be cured but never will be according to the laws of capitalism.  Shane's storyline might occasionally wander into the far-fetched, but the exploration and explanation of the biotechnology industry is extremely enlightening.

Debut novelist Sherman does an enviable job of juggling his two unique topics without shorting his characters and without resorting to unrealistic information dumps.  Caleb is a fascinating character, driven to find a life that means something in the wake of 9/11.  Shane is a sympathetic new dad who would do anything to win back the brother he has always idolized.  The only place that Sherman failed, which unfortunately proves to be too memorable in book that is otherwise likeable, is in the quiet moments with his newborn when Sherman attempts to capture the universality of feeling that prompts Shane to risk his career, reputation, and possibly his freedom to help a stranger's baby.  Sherman doesn't quite hit his mark with this crucial point, and it leaves a lot of Shane's story to feel, at best, foolish, and at worst, completely ungenuine.  Despite this failing, Race Against the Sky is a unique, well-paced, and interesting first novel from Derek Sherman, and I'll be looking forward to what he comes up with next.

(I received this book from the publisher via LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program.)

Touch by Alexi Zentner

Wow, last week passed in a whirlwind. I only got 2 days of Book Blogger Appreciation Week in before I got swept away. Thanks again to everyone who stopped by and left a comment, it was a pleasure to meet a bunch of new bloggers, and I hope to be paying many of you visits shortly. If you're one of a few new subscribers that have appeared since those lovely two days of BBAW, thanks for sticking around. I hope you will talk to me so I won't feel like I'm swimming around in a fish tank all on my own. ;-)

Now, I'm going to try something I've been very lax about doing in the past few weeks. We'll say weeks. We might mean months. Or something in between weeks and months. Is there something between weeks and months? Forgive me, I digress. I am about to attempt reviewing a book (!!) I read a good time ago, and I'm attempting to psych myself up for it, but really I may just be procrastinating.

Nonetheless, weeks months ago I read a book called Touch by Alexi Zentner. Previous to that I had posted a Waiting on Wednesday post about it, after which I fell profoundly in love with its cover in all its incarnations. Then, after hyping the book mercilessly to myself for a couple months, I actually got and read a copy which, unsurprisingly, did not measure up to all my self-hyping. So then I put it on the backburner for a long time, and then all the sudden here it is on the longlist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and I'm thinking maybe it's time to revisit Touch after all.

Zentner's debut finds Stephen Boucher, an Anglican minister, returned home to keep watch by his mother's deathbed. As Stephen waits for his mother's inevitable passing, he has many long hours to contemplate his past in Sawgamet and to reflect on how his and his family's lives are woven inextricably into the fabric of a place fraught with myth and mystery. From the moment Stephen's grandfather Jeannot is halted in his westward progress through the virgin territory of British Columbia by his dog Flaireur's refusal to go on any further, Sawgamet takes a firm hold of the Boucher clan.


Sawgamet is richly drawn, a coldly beautiful town filled with ghosts and the darkly magical, a character in its own right. In fact, the strength of this novel lies in Zentner's ability to imbue the gold rush town turned logging town into a place crawling with the mystical. It's easy to picture ghosts, some well-meaning most not, lurking in Zentner's frozen wilderness. Stephen's own memories of his childhood complete with a tragic accident and his grandfather's mysterious return after years of absence are melded with the stories he's always been told of his grandfather and grandmother, stories of impossible magic, burning chemistry, and unexplained treasure.


Stephen's memories ground the story in the realities of a logging town, filled with men carving out a living from the region's dangerous lumber industry. Try though he might, he can no longer cull the truth from the fiction, but the stories have taken on lives of their own, and it's the stories that make Touch soar. As much as the stories with their mythical proportions do transfix, Touch is one book that might very well benefit from one of those diagrams that map out the family tree that sometimes crop up within the first few pages of books. Perhaps with that, I would have wasted much less time and brain power trying to pin down who was related to who and could have dedicated myself to fully enjoying Zentner's tale, parts of which I'm sure went over my head while I was busy trying to figure out who exactly Stephen's uncle was married to. Also, it sometimes seemed that the characters, who should be ultra-sympathetic, sometimes held the reader at arm's length. While I appreciated their stories, I rarely felt like I was fully involved with them. Aside from my own obsessiveness about the family tree, though, Touch is a hauntingly beautiful tale filled with the elusive magic of storytelling.

Fancy hearing some other opinions?

She Reads Novels
Reading Matters
Book Bliss
KevinfromCanada


Oh, how important are the reviews anyway? Wouldn't you pick up this book based on the pretty covers alone? Which is your favorite? Or are you that rare creature that really doesn't judge a book by its cover?

The Blue Notebook by James A. Levine

Another book review brought to you by "Embarassing LibraryThing Early Reviewers Backlog." Today we have, The Blue Notebook by James Levine, arguably the hardest book I've read all year. It's not hard because of the writing, but the subject matter is downright painful.


The Blue Notebook is the story of Batuk, an Indian girl who was sold by her father into sex slavery at the age of nine. When the story begins, Batuk is nested on the Common Street in Mumbai, and at the age of fifteen she is already very well acquainted with the practice of pleasuring her male clients, which she refers to as "making sweet-cake." Batuk knows the tricks of her trade too well for one so young. Batuk has a secret refuge, though, a refuge few of her counterparts can claim. Despite being from a poor rural village, Batuk can read and write, and her words become her refuge and her preservation from a cruel way of life.

And so I look within myself and assemble myself in words. I take the words that are my thoughts and dreams and hide them behind the dark shadow of my kidney. I compress my need for love into words and hide that as a drop of blackness next to my liver (it will be safe there until I need it). I transcribe the poetry of life into words, and with care slide it between sinews of muscle where he will not find it. I craft the words of merriment and sadness (they are the same) into a pyramid and place it under my skin so I can touch it whenever I need to know where my feelings are. I compile my memories into a record full of words and slip that into a slot left open for it in my head. There is plenty of room for all the words in the world to live in me; they are welcome here. He may have taken my light and extinguished it, but now within me can hide an army of whispering syllables, rhythms, and sounds. All you may see is a black cavity that fills a tiny girl, but trust me, the words are there, alive and fine.

Levine paints a raw, gritty and painfully real picture of Mumbai and molds a smart, strong, sympathetic narrator whose only worth in the world has been reduced to what men will pay to have her. Levine shies away from none of the rough edges or the harsh realities of Mumbai itself, nor does he let us look away from the constant struggle that is Batuk's life as she learns her trade and discovers how she has to survive in the new life she's been forced into. Levine gives us a girl, though, whose indomitable spirit and her refuge in the written word sustains her through a life filled with tragedy that is difficult even to read about. Levine's prose is full of vivid descriptions and is even poetic in its own way, but my one complaint would be that sometimes he lets his prose get away from him. There are places where it's better to state the obvious instead of going the more flowery route. For example...

With a big brown brush she wiped cream under my armpit nearest her and shaved off the early grasses of womanhood using a razor.

That one earned an emphatic eye roll from me. (I mean, "early grasses of womanhood".....really?) Thankfully, this is one of only a few rare occasions where Levine seems to get carried away in his efforts to enrich his prose.

The Blue Notebook is a profound and unflinching work of fiction. It's not the sort of book that you're liable to enjoy, but it is an important and eye-opening work that should be read. Even more, it is a book that should be bought because all of the U.S. proceeds from the sale of The Blue Notebook are being donated to the International and National Centers for Missing and Exploited Children.

Family Sentence: The Search for my Cuban-Revolutionary, Prison-Yard, Mythic-Hero, Deadbeat Dad by Jeanine Cornillot

I know it's hard to believe, but I think it's about to happen. I'm going to review a book that was written for an adult audience. It's been over a month, but hopefully I've been the only one counting. We have my quest to catch up with LibraryThing Early Reviewer books to thank for this one.


Family Sentence is Jeanine Cornillot's tale of growing up with a father in prison. Growing up, Jeanine's world is sharply divided. There's the world she knows, the one where she lives in a house dominated by women in suburban Philadelphia where men are absent and foreign to her. The other part of her world is a little more uncertain. Summers, growing up, she spent with her Cuban grandparents in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami. Most of her Miami relatives speak no English and Jeanine, despite being half Cuban, knows no Spanish. Despite having her cousins for interpreting, the language barrier and her decidedly un-Cuban looks make her own relatives a little foreign to her despite being bound by blood.

Jeanine's father, a self-professed Cuban revolutionary determined to free Cuba from Castro's rule, was in prison for all of the childhood she can remember for the crime of bombing an Air Canada ticket office. All that she knows of her father she learns from his infrequent letters and a few family trips to visit him in prison during her summers in Miami. All the rest, she makes up as she goes along. She worries and wonders about her father's life in prison, imagines a family reunion that she's certain will never happen while she's still a child, and she perpetrates tiny acts of terrorism in school hallways imagining the revolutionary blood that runs through her veins and bonds her to a father who she doesn't know and will never understand.

Family Sentence is a book about a girl growing into a woman and trying to piece together the disparate pieces of her identity. It's also the story of a girl trying to know a father who is distant and perplexing even when he volunteers answers to any question she might have. It's a story about reconciling the myth of a dad, who by his ideals and through a daughter's loving but ignorant eyes has become larger than life with a real person who has lived an imperfect life without the regrets readers would expect.

Cornillot tells her story with brutal honesty, painting the naive girl she was, desperate to look and seem more "Cuban" for a father who could barely be bothered to remember her when they were apart. She brings her young self to vivid life with many anecdotes of her young life complete with her girlhood imaginings and her childish quirks like her penchant for saying "that's a crime" about anything that seems slightly unjust. Unfortunately, sometimes it seems like the anecdotes get away from her, and that makes for the book's one flaw that it's easy to get lost in the individual anecdotes and lose track of where Cornillot is going with the larger narrative of her life with and without her father. However, the book seems to collect itself in its final chapters as Jeanine reunites with her father as a teenager and a young adult and all the myths and misconceptions she had about her father collide. Ultimately, Cornillot's is a compelling memoir that draws us into her life and tells a personal story that every kid who's ever idolized a parent only to grow up and discover a fallible human being can relate to.

Review copy received from Beacon Press via LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

Home Girl: Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block by Judith Matloff

Greetings, everybody. Sorry (yes, I really am - I'd much rather be here doing this than, say, at my pooey job) it's yet again been a week since I've been able to entertain you with my thrilling anecdotes and thoughtful book reviews. I've been busy working at that aforementioned pooey job and, get this, reading books. I finished The Abstinence Teacher which is another one that needs to marinate a while before I decide if I did or did not like it or if I fall into neither camp. I'm about halfway through the first Farworld book, and it's a great page turner. Also, again with the help of the TBR randomizer which somehow "knew" that I was hoping to alternate fiction with non-fiction and chose me a non-fiction title, I've just started The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry by Kathleen Flinn - at least, I think that's what it's called. The title is so long that I wouldn't put it past me to screw it up. Anyhow, it's a memoir by a woman who got fired from her corporate management job which she didn't particularly like in the first place and then decides to follow her dream to learn to cook at famous French cooking school, Le Cordon Bleu. I've only read a few pages, but it already seems promising.

I'm afraid I've been putting off my review of Home Girl. Not because I didn't like it - I actually liked it quite a bit. I just don't feel like I have anything especially penetratingly insightful to say about it. That, and the working and the reading usually leave me with hardly enough time to even say penetratingly insightful things about books for which penetratingly insightful thoughts do readily come to mind. Anywho, I fully intend to make a solid attempt forthwith even if I have to do so without my usual penetrating insight. Hey...you! Yeah, you! Quit rolling your eyes!

*crickets*

Okay, I think I'm ready now.




After years of cultivating a successful career as a foreign correspondent that had her traveling to all manner of dangerous locations, Judith Matloff stumbled into her mid-life crisis seeking all the things that she had neglected all her life: commitment, safety, and family. When she loses a baby in dangerous and painful fashion in Russia after chasing a story in Chechnya, she vows to change the way she lives and seek out a real home in New York City, her hometown. Having accumulated a fair amount of funds, she sets out to find the right neighborhood for herself, her husband John, and their well-traveled canine companion, Khaya. Her scouting leads her to West Harlem (before it was cool or even safe to live in West Harlem) a place she deems to be a thriving neighborhood with lots of Latin American flavor that reminds her of her past travels. When the opportunity comes to buy a run-down, fixer-upper of a house at a rock-bottom price, she pays cash on the spot without a second thought as to why the asking price is so low, hoping for the best from the house and from her new neighborhood.

What she gets is far from the best. Judith soon realizes that the reason the house was shown so early in the morning was that by noon the street becomes a hotbed of cocaine-dealing activity complete with hoards of Dominican men eager to be rich back in their own country effortlessly coordinating massive drug transactions providing drugs to much of the east coast. The dealers think nothing of leaving trash everywhere, urinating on her front steps, and leaning somewhat menacingly on her gate. As if this wasn't bad enough, there's Salami, the unhinged crack addict next door, and he's angry about being displaced from "his" house. While Judith assembles a motley crew of workmen to begin the long task of restoring the house, Salami spends all his spare time, of which he has a lot, skulking about and singing "I'll be watching you" in an effort to get Judith to abandon the house he still thinks of as his.

What's surprising about this book is not that Harlem was a hub of criminal activity nor that frightening and disruptive people seemed to be lurking at all hours in this dangerous neighborhood, but how Judith and John embrace their melting-pot neighborhood. Judith strikes up a surprisingly respectful and businesslike friendship with the director of the local drug crew, Miguel, at the same time as she is collecting another group of acquaintances at community meetings where, it is thought, her white face will encourage a stronger response from police to the neighborhood's many problems. Clarence the super from across the street doesn't have the most attractive personality, but he does have a natural cure for whatever might be ailing you while Mackenzie a well-educated recovering addict squatting in the basement of Clarence's building is a frequent borrower of books from Matloff's collection. Other interesting neighbors include a Julliard-trained organist who grows a garden of fake flowers and a feisty elderly black woman still going strong in her 80s who is renowned throughout the neighborhood.

Matloff's connections with the many unique characters that make up her neighborhood even as it begins to transform from underprivileged drug Wall Steet to the dwelling of yuppies are what makes this book shine. It's as charming as it is ironic to find one of the first white couples to venture into West Harlem embracing their community and its members embracing them. Sure, there are many bumps, and occasional bottomless craters, in the road which Matloff renders honestly, but by the time the house is restored and police have finally begun to crack down on the most egregious drug activity, it's clear that her house in Harlem proved to be a great growing experience for Judith and that the she did, at last, find just the sort of home she was longing for albeit in the most unlikely of places.

The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton

When I found out I would be receiving this book from Library Thing Early Reviewers, I kind of wondered what it was that made me request it in the first place. That's not to say that the premise didn't sound interesting to me or that I wasn't very eager to finally get a fiction book from them (has anybody else been noticing a trend toward memoirs here? Er...it's not over). I mean, it sounds fluffy, it sounds like a feel good book. I'm categorically against fluff and when asked to recommend a feel-good book, I usually find myself completely unable to (yes, this has actually happened) because, it happens, I just don't read them.

So I approached The Wednesday Sisters with interest and, admittedly, some trepidation. Here is the story of five friends meeting together in a local park where their kids play. It's the 1960s and while women have made some strides away from more traditional roles, they aren't quite "liberated" yet and they've still been trained to believe that they belong in the house with the kids and that their dreams should play second fiddle to their husbands' dreams. Clayton's writing proceeds with the breezy ease that comes with a book that would make for good company at the beach. The easy, simple writing style is deceptive, however, as there is just so much here. This is a tale of grown women coming of age. Despite their being out of school and having husbands and children, these women don't yet know themselves or where they belong in a time and place fraught with changes.

As the five decide to turn their Wednesday conversations at the park into a more serious time of writing and critiquing each other's work, Clayton brings their quest to know themselves and each other to life. Through their writing, the women slowly get to know the most intimate truths about each other and begin to realize some things about themselves in the process. As Frankie, Linda, Brett, Ally, and Kath take their dreams down off the shelf where they were relegated when marriage and children came along and simultaneously face the struggles and trials of everyday life, they are forced to find out just what they are made of and how far they will go to be there for each other.

Clayton offers an insightful depiction of an uneasy time in history when women were struggling both to maintain the sort of feminine expectations their mothers had modeled for them and to take hold of new opportunities to pursue their own dreams and break free of the stereotypes of what a woman should and should not be. Clayton's book asks the questions about womanhood that continue to be relevant today, questions about what really makes a woman. A child? A family? A career? A dream?

What emerges is a heartwarming tale of the friendship of five women who seem to be meeting and defining themselves for the first time in an era when having a child might still define a woman but so could being a surgeon or even an astronaut. This is an easy read, but don't let it fool you. There's a deeper story here than what meets the eye.

The Widows of Eden by George Shaffner

The citizens of Ebb, Nebraska are suffering through their worst drought in history. After more than one hundred days without rain, farmers who have lived in Ebb for their entire lives are packing up and disappearing in the middle of the night unable to make a go of it any longer. Not to worry, though, help is on the way. Word comes that a certain Vernon Moore, mysterious traveling salesman and occasional worker of miracles, is on his way for his first visit to Ebb in about five years. The quaint townspeople of Ebb believe that Mr. Moore is the answer to their prayers and their only chance for rain, but the ailing multi-millionaire Clem Tucker has other ideas. What happens when Clem proposes a deal that would have Mr. Moore choose to spare his life instead of asking for rain?

This is the premise of George Shaffner's The Widows of Eden. It defied my expectations in more ways than one. There were parts of this book that I enjoyed very much and others that nearly discouraged me from finishing it. The premise is very attractive, which is why I requested and received it from Library Thing's Early Reviewer program. The follow-through is a bit less than optimal. At the helm of the book is first person narrator Wilma Porter who operates the bed and breakfast where Mr. Moore stays when he is in town and is also the fiance of the aforementioned Clem Tucker. As one might guess, Ms. Porter is very much at the center of the story given her relationships to those two pivotal characters, however, her first person narration continues even into places and situations where she is not present which is somewhat disorienting. It also often seems that Shaffner has taken every stereotype of small town fiction and played each up to a fever pitch that can, unfortunately, be a bit cringeworthy. Sometimes this can be overlooked - I'll admit to giggling at a few of Wilma's kooky comments such as, "An amendment to the state constitution was supposed to prevent the sale of family farms to big corporations, but it turned out to have more loopholes than a cheap shag rug." Other times, Shaffner overplays his quaint rural fiction hand with his constant use of the endearment "honey pot," the existence of an all-powerful Quilting Circle of gossipy ladies who don't seem to do any quilting at all, and Wilma's irritating way of never referring to her goddaughter by her name but as her "sweet/perfect/adorable little goddaughter."

That said, there were parts of this book that I found so absorbing that I could forgive this book some of its more irritating tendencies. Despite the occasional lapse into pure cheese, Shaffner writes snappy dialogue and creates a cast of very lively characters bent on saving their town and their way of life. The mystery of Vernon's possibly miraculous origins as well as the origins of three widow friends who accompany him on the occasion of this book is well thought out and even a bit suspenseful. My favorite part, however, was Vernon's conversations with Clem on the subject of the deist's paradox (which suggests that a benevolent God would intervene in the affairs of men and since He hasn't in quite some time He has abandoned us), the nature of God, and his attempts to persuade the unbelieving Clem that God cares for His creation and hasn't retreated to heaven leaving His people to their own devices. I'll be the first to admit that having guaged the tone of this novel, I didn't expect a philosophical discussion this well thought out and absorbing. I might not believe everything that was said, but I drank it up and these scenes kept the pages turning the quickest. By the end, I was thoroughly curious whether Vernon would be able to convince this selfish and heartless millionaire of God's existence and providence and what would happen if he couldn't.

All in all, this book seemed to be a paradox in and of itself, as if Shaffner intended to write a lighthearted novel for those in need of some small town centered brain candy but ended up with something a bit more serious than that, and the reader is stuck trying to figure out just how to take it. While it isn't one of my favorite reads and it definitely wasn't what I was expecting, it does have its redeeming qualities and as such could make for a fun summer read with a side of a little food for thought.

The publication date for this book is June 17, 2008.

That's another one down for Pub 2008 and the Spring Reading Thing, too!

Have You Found Her by Janice Erlbaum

Well, it's been a pretty crummy week, and I can't say I feel much like writing a book review today, but here I am anyway. The good folks at Library Thing and Random House sent me a copy of Have You Found Her to review through the Early Reviewer program. Despite my reluctance to write much of anything this week, this book definitely deserves to be reviewed before I've begun to forget it's finer points. So here it goes...



In Have You Found Her, Janice Erlbaum has written a fine a memoir with all the trappings of a novel. As a kid, Erlbaum fled her home only to find herself in the New York City shelter system. In her mid-thirties, having reconciled with her parents and attained some measure of success in her life, she decides it is time to return to the shelter where she once resided to volunteer and give back to the place that helped her when she most needed it.

While volunteering, Janice meets Sam, an abused, drug-addicted, and very troubled teenager trying to turn her life around. She sees something of herself in Sam and falls in love with the girl and what she has the potential to do for Sam. As their relationship deepens and Sam's health takes a turn for the worse, Janice learns that Sam is even more disturbed than she could have imagined.

Erlbaum's memoir is compulsively readable. She honestly confronts the dilemmas of volunteering head on. Do we volunteer and try to help merely for the sake of being altruistic? Or do we volunteer to give ourselves that good feeling that comes from having sacrificed of ourselves for the good of others? Erlbaum confronts this and many other questions as she explores her relationship with Sam and both the good and bad things it brings out in her own character. While it's hard to watch Erlbaum struggle through a year of being a de facto mother to a severely troubled girl, it's easy to see why she fell in love with Sam and her very mixed feelings about feeling responsible for a girl who is so smart and so lovable but also so tremendously damaged.

This memoir reads similarly to a novel. It's full of interesting and lovable "characters" from Janice and Sam to Janice's ever-supportive partner Bill to Sam's other "moms" Maria and Jodi. It has several very unexpected "plot twists" and runs the full gamut of emotions. Though this memoir has many things to recommend it, I most appreciated Erlbaum's efforts to present an honest account of her year with Sam. She doesn't skirt the big issues and doesn't try to make herself look like some sort of perfect volunteer faultlessly picking up the downtrodden youth of New York City. Instead, she reflects on a very real and very difficult experience and the way she actually reacted to it at the time as well as how she felt about it in retrospect. It's this honesty and self-awareness that makes Have You Found Her really stand out.

Read another review at Booking Mama.