We're always pleased to be able to say, about those very book reviews,
When a white servant girl violates the order of plantation society, she unleashes a tragedy that exposes the worst and best in the people she has come to call her family.
Orphaned while onboard ship from Ireland, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives on the steps of a tobacco plantation where she is to live and work with the slaves of the kitchen house. Under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate daughter, Lavinia becomes deeply bonded to her adopted family, though she is set apart from them by her white skin.
Eventually, Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. Lavinia finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds. When she is forced to make a choice, loyalties are brought into question, dangerous truths are laid bare, and lives are put at risk.
The Kitchen House is a tragic story of page-turning suspense, exploring the meaning of family, where love and loyalty prevail.
No twentieth-century American writer has captured the popular imagination as much as Ernest Hemingway. This novel tells his story from a unique point of view — that of his first wife, Hadley. Through her eyes and voice, we experience Paris of the Lost Generation and meet fascinating characters such as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Gerald and Sara Murphy. The city and its inhabitants provide a vivid backdrop to this engrossing and wrenching story of love and betrayal that is made all the more poignant knowing that, in the end, Hemingway would write of his first wife, "I wish I had died before I loved anyone but her."
This is an audaciously original book, all the more so when one reflects that the author is only in her mid-twenties. It takes place in a Balkan location - likely Belgrade and the surrounding countryside - and focuses on a young woman - Natalia's - search for the truth about the last days of her grandfather.
The narrative is woven around Natalia's remembrances of two fable-like stories narrated to her by her grandfather, which weave tighter and tighter and ultimately reveal their truths. There is a magical realism quality to these stories, which encompass the haunting tale of a rogue tiger, an abused deaf-mute woman who is feared by the villagers and rumored to be the tiger's wife, Darisa the bear and tiger hunter, and a "deathless man" who may be the nephew of Death itself, whose appearances often portend catastrophe.
Similarly, at the heart of The Tiger's Wife, a pampered tiger abandoned by war in a deserted zoo becomes "free" and reverts back to his original nature, placing the only person with the compassion to feed him at risk. Ms. Obreht writes, "If things had turned out differently, if that winter's disaster had fallen in some alternate order...the rumors that spread about the tiger's wife might have been different...But because that winter was the longest anyone could remember, and filled with a thousand small discomforts, a thousand senseless quarrels, a thousand personal shames, the tiger's wife shouldered the blame for the villagers' misfortunes." THIS Tiger burns bright with allegory as well.
The year is 1575. Word about Hannah Levi's expert skills in midwifery has spread even to the Venetian nobility, which prompts a late-night visit to her apartment in the Ghetto Nuovo. The Conte di Padovani's wife, Lucia, lies close to death in childbirth, and he desperately needs Hannah's help.
Hannah's decision to accompany the Conte to his palazzo goes against her rabbi's wishes as well as a papal edict. Jews are forbidden to treat Christian patients, and if either the mother or the child dies, she will bring the wrath of Christian Venice down on everyone in the ghetto. And should anyone in the Conte's household discover her birthing spoons, the forbidden tool she invented to assist with deliveries, she could be charged with witchcraft.
In return for this high-risk endeavour, she strikes a bargain: As payment, she asks for enough money to rescue her husband. While on a trading voyage, Isaac was captured by mercenaries in the pay of the Knights of St. John, men “reeking of drink and sweat and religion,” and languishes in prison on Malta.
So begins a lively tale involving love, blackmail, family, murder, plague, intercultural compassion, dramatic last-minute rescues and some very creative disguises. There is a lot going on, and the brisk pacing ensures ever-changing action.
So begins a lively tale involving love, blackmail, family, murder, plague, intercultural compassion, dramatic last-minute rescues and some very creative disguises. There is a lot going on, and the brisk pacing ensures ever-changing action.
A Mountain of Crumbs, by Elena Gorokhova Her exquisitely wrought, tender memoir of growing up in the Soviet Union…could be taught as a master class in memoir writing. … Gorokhova writes about her life with a novelist’s gift for threading motives around the heart of a story. … Each chapter distills a new revelation in poetic prose.
The 20 episodes in A Mountain of Crumbs are extraordinarily rich in sensory and emotional detail and offer an engrossing portrait of a very lively, intelligent girl coming of emotional and intellectual age in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.”
