The Invisible Bridge - Wendy's Review

One and a half million Jewish men and women and children. How was anyone to understand a number like that? Andras knew it took three thousand to fill the seats of the Dohany Street Synagogue. To accommodate a million and a half, one would have had to replicate that building , its arches and domes, its Moorish interior, its balcony, its dark wooden pews and gilded ark, five hundred times. And then to envision each man and woman and child inside as a unique and irreplaceable human being, the way he imagined Mendel Horovitz or the Ivory Tower or his brother Matyas, each of them with desires and fears, a mother and a father, a birthplace, a bed, a first love, a web of memories, a cache of secrets, a skin, a heart, an infinitely complicated brain – to imagine them that way, and then to imagine them dead, extinguished for all time – how could anyone begin to grasp it? – from The Invisible Bridge, page 536 - 

 Andras Levi, a Hungarian Jew, finds himself full of hope and excitement on a train to Paris in 1937. He has won a scholarship to a school of architecture, an unbelievable opportunity for a Jewish man living in the shadow of war. In Paris, he nurses his art and ambition, finds camaraderie with men who will change his life, and discovers love with a beautiful ballet teacher. He misses his brothers – Tibor, a medical student who finds opportunity in Italy, and Matyas, a boy who is on the brink of becoming a man and whose carefree spirit finds joy in theater. But as Europe becomes embroiled in war, all three young men will find themselves back in Hungary and struggling to survive the labor service and the steady erosion of human rights as Hitler’s influence and power come ever closer.

Julie Orringer’s novel The Invisible Bridge is a searing, sweeping, and ultimately triumphant story about love, war, survival and the endurance of the human spirit. Andras, his brothers, their wives, their children, their parents, and the friends they discover are all wonderfully developed by the talented Orringer. Paris with its noisy bars and beautiful architecture and radiant theaters and opera houses comes alive as Orringer’s characters establish their lives and nurse their dreams of a future. 

The Invisible Bridge is a heartbreaking novel – how could it be anything less? One does not have to be a student of history to know the story of the Jewish people during WWII. But in this sprawling novel, Orringer puts a human face on the tragedy and gives her readers a glimpse of an often ignored part of the story – that of the Hungarian Jews whose government allied with the Germans early on and used its people as slave labor in the war machine. The sense of inevitability is strong as Orringer builds her story. I found myself breathless, emotional, wanting to stop the march forward as Andras and his brothers and the people they love are thrust into a world beyond their control.

He wanted to believe that someone could be watching in pity and horror, someone who could change things if he chose. He wanted to believe that men were not in charge. But in the center of his sternum he felt a cold certainty that told him otherwise. He believed in God, yes, the God of his fathers, the one to whom he’d prayed in Koyar and Debrecen and Paris and in the work service, but that God, the One, was not One who intervened in the way they needed someone to intervene just then. He had designed the cosmos and thrown its doors open to man, and man had moved in and begun a life there. But God could no more step inside and rearrange that life than an architect could rearrange the lives of a building’s inhabitants. - from The Invisible Bridge, page 432 -

As with all memorable works, The Invisible Bridge succeeds through its careful attention to detail, the development of its characters and the strength of its prose. Orringer has a finely honed sense of who her characters are – their fears, their vulnerabilities, their strengths, their dreams. She takes them to the edge, and then allows them to find their way back – battered, wiser, but never diminished.

There are big themes in this novel – the importance of art, the strength of familial bonds, the idea that we are but a speck in the universe being born along on a tide of which we have little control.

Of course. Why would a man not argue his own shameful culpability, why would he not crave responsibility for disaster, when the alternative was to find himself to be nothing more than a speck of human dust? - from The Invisible Bridge, page 489 -

It would be easy for an author to allow these themes to sink her novel into despair. But it is a testament to Orringer’s talent that she never vacates hope and a promise for something better for her characters.

It is no surprise that I loved this novel. I loved its scope, its humanity, and its honesty. I loved Orringer’s prose, and her ability to resurrect the feel of a generation marching towards war. I loved the characters – Andras with his generous heart, Tibor with his sensitivity and Matyas with his free spirit. I loved that Orringer did not abandon me in darkness, but lifted me into the light. This is a book that adds to our understanding of history and provides insight into the human side of war. It is remarkable. And you should read it.

Highly recommended.

Swamplandia! - Wendy's Review

The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it. When I was a kid I couldn’t see any of these ridges. It was only after Swamplandia!’s fall that time folded into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. If you’re short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell. – from Swamplandia!, page 7 -


It has been a year since Hilola Bigtree died from ovarian cancer leaving behind her three children – Ava, Osceola (“Ossie”), and Kiwi – and “The Chief,” her husband. Swamplandia!, with their mother at its center, is the family business and the only life the Bigtree children have ever known. Wrestling alligators, selling “museum” trinkets, and entertaining the tourists who arrive on the ferry is what they have always done. But, now things have changed. Their mother’s loss has not only left them achingly alone, but has also left Swamplandia! without a star act. And there is a new game in town by the name of World of Darkness, a garish theme park of twisted rides inside a whale’s digestive tract and pools filled with ruby colored water. Kiwi, nearly seventeen and longing for a college education, runs away from Swamplandia! to become an employee at World of Darkness. Chief Bigtree mysteriously disappears on one of his vague “business trips,” and Ossie, just turned sixteen, seems lost in a world of ghosts and an old dredge boat. Ava, age thirteen, is left to her own devices and resolves to save Swamplandia! and her family before time runs out.

Karen Russell’s Orange Prize nominated debut novel is filled with quirky characters, rambling plot lines, and gorgeous descriptions of the Florida swamps. It is also a darkly constructed story about the individual nature of grief and loss. Each character in Swamplandia! is devastated by the loss of Hilola – a woman whose death-defying act of swimming with the alligators (called “Seths”) opens the novel. It seems that death is all around this family – from the monstrous Seths, to the World of Darkness where tourists are called “Lost Souls,” to Ossie’s flirtation with a dead teenage dredgeman, to Ava’s fantasy of visiting the Underworld and finding her mother. Each character is traveling their own path through grief.

Chief Bigtree, the dad, is oddly disconnected from the reality of his failing business. He seems unaware that his children are falling apart. His reaction to the loss of his wife can only be called denial. Perhaps Ava understands this best of all when she observes:

You could become a fossil in your lifetime, I’d discovered. I’d seen the eerie correspondence between the living Seths in our Pit and their taxidermied brothers in our museum. The Chief could achieve an ossified quality, too, with his headdress skeletally flattened against the sofa back, drunk and asleep. – from Swamplandia!, page 238 -

Kiwi flees the family, and runs from the memory of his mother whose image he keeps taped to the inside of his closet door. He leaves behind the safety of Swamplandia! and enters society where his differences stand out and he struggles to fit in with his peers. Now seventeen years old, he is no longer a child whose eyes are closed to the stark reality of his parents’ world and as he navigates through his grief, he uncovers family secrets and a rage he hardly knew existed.

Ossie escapes reality by slipping into a world of ghosts and fantasy. On the cusp of womanhood, she begins a relationship with the ghost of a dredge boat, slipping out of the house at all hours and spending her time calling up spirits with the help of a mysterious book.

She set off across the muck as briskly as a mainland woman who is late for her ferry. Her footprints filled with groundwater and as I watched a dozen tiny lakes opened between us. Rain blew in from the east while out west the sun burned through a V in the trees, bright and gluey-gold as marmalade. – from Swamplandia!, page 127 -

But is is Ava, narrator of much of the novel, who is the saddest in her grief. She believes her mother has trained her to become the next amazing alligator wrestler. Ava tries to hold her family together, and when that fails, she dreams up a way to save Swamplandia! which includes applying to compete in an alligator wrestling competition, and hand raising a rare red alligator. Ava’s memories of her mother are clear and poignant, and cloaked in a child’s reflections.

Our mother, in several beautiful ways, may have been a little crazy. For example: who dries their clothing with a hurricane coming? Like Ossie, Mom got distracted easily. It was seventy-thirty odds whether she would remember a conversation with you. Her moods could do sudden plummets, and she’d have to “take a rest” in the house, but she’d always emerge from these spells with a smile for us. Until she got sick, I can’t remember our mother ever missing a show. – from Swamplandia!, page 43 -

Swamplandia! is, at its heart, about the love that binds a family together in the face of devastating loss. The strength of the novel is in its characters who are memorable and feel very real. Russell also excels at description of the flora and fauna of the Florida swamps. Where the novel struggles is in the plot which tends to drag until the latter third of book. Russell alternates between Ava’s first person narration and Kiwi’s third person point of view – a technique which tended to break up momentum in the plot. It felt, at times, like Russell could not decide whose story she really wanted to tell. Ava’s voice is, overwhelmingly, the strongest and could have carried the novel alone.

Despite its occasional humor, Swamplandia! is a dark novel which resonates with danger. Reality is often fragile and just out of reach. Not everything is as it seems. It is this haunting quality which carries the reader through the final pages of the book to an ending that stretches believability. In fact, the end of the novel did not endear me to it. Russell quickly wraps up the book and pins a little bow on it, something I found frustrating after some plot twists which took my breath away.

I did not love this book, but I found it interesting. Russell is a talented author whose child characters pulled on my heartstrings, but whose meandering plot kept me from fulling engaging in their story.

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A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Marg's Review)

Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.

We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to aver the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city's demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own whilst starting at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nationale. We meed Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life - divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house - and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco's punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang - who thrived and faltered - and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie's catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou's far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertone of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption, and the universal tendency to reach for both - and escape the merciless progress of time - in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

With inside cover copy like that, and the fact that this is the book that won the Pulitzer prize and others, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize as well, who needs a review!

When I look back on this book in a couple of years time I think the thing that will still be strong in my memory is the structure of the book - if you could call it structure as such. It isn't a novel as much as it is an interlocking collection of short stories. This isn't a book that goes from point A to point B. It probably starts at point G and eventually gets to point Z with side trips past point A and B.

In my own mind I was trying to think of a comparison to show how this book works and the closest I could come up with was one of those puzzles we used to have as kids where there was a mixed up picture in a square and there was one piece missing so you had to move all the pieces around until the picture was formed. At first you would get occasional glimpses of what the jumbled image was going to look like, but then you would have to break the picture up to make another piece of the puzzle fit. Eventually though, the last piece slides into place and you see the whole image.

Another analogy might be a really long conversation with a very good friend, where you jump topics with ease, reminiscing about the past, talking about the future, and sharing a joke. Never a linear conversation but rather one that starts at one point, and then ends up somewhere completely different and you find yourself wondering how you got there!

Another aspect of structure that was very different in this book is that Egan experiments with all different forms of storytelling. There are chapters written in the form of a magazine column, another in Powerpoint as well as different tenses and points of view. I think the Powerpoint chapter was amazing! The language was sparse, the story barely there on the page, but the concepts and the narrative were still strong enough to be clear for the reader, and I loved that we got to see Sasha's future life.

After looking at the structure, how about the characters. I can't say that I particularly related to the characters that we met in the pages of the book, but such is Egan's skill that you actually didn't need to. Our two main characters are Sasha and Bennie. Sasha is on a date with Alex when her habit of stealing things, anything, causes her to steal a wallet whilst in the bathroom. As she analyses why she steals with her shrink, Alex crosses one of her boundaries without even knowing it. We meet Sasha again as a young woman struggling to make ends meet living as a runaway in Naples, and then through the eyes of her best friend Rob who has plenty of demons of his own.

In the next chapter we meet Bennie, who is Alex's boss. He is a divorced man who is struggling to relate to his 9 year old son. One way that he can occasionally connect is through music, but even that is problematical. Through the book we see Benny with his ex wife in happier times, then we meet him as a youth revelling in the punk rock scene with his friends. We meet his mentor Lou and his very young girlfriend and her friend.

The links as we move from chapter to chapter are at times tenuous, but they are all there for a reason. Along the way, Egan makes comment about some important issues. Not only the power of music to transcend time, but also for example the power of media when a washed up PR person is employed to try and rehabilitate the image of an African dictator.

Another chapter that I really liked, not because it was enjoyable but because of the food for thought it provided, was the final chapter. It is set in New York in the not too distant future and Egan has taken our current obsession with social media and expanded it to the nth degree to come up with a quite scary world where even the youngest child has exposure to the media in a way that is similar to our own world but amplified many times over. A washed up musician is being bought back for a live concert and one of our characters is being asked to find some parrots - people who can spread the word, hype up the event to make it a success, to make it the kind of event that everyone who is anyone will claim to have been at even if they really aren't. In a way it kind of reminded me of a discussion of the difference between buzz and hype and how one, or the other, is generated, whether it is organic or whether there is someone in the background pulling the strings to manipulate the public.

This is the second Egan book I have read and liked. A few years ago now I read The Keep which was a kind of modern, gothicky ghost story. I am not sure why I haven't bothered to go and track down her other books. I will definitely be watching to see what the author comes up with next as she doesn't seem to be afraid to take risks in her writing and to take her readers on the journey with her!

Rating 4/5

The Secret Lives of Baba Sagi's Wives by Lola Shoneyin (Jill)

The Secret Lives of Baba Sagi's Wives
By Lola Shoneyin
Completed July 29, 2011

Bolanle is the youngest and newest wife to enter Baba Sagi's household. The only one of the wives that is educated, Bonanle presents a threat to the other wives - in more ways than one. They are intimidated by her education and concerned that a secret shared by all three wives will be revealed. So begins the plight of the women who are the cornerstone to The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives.

Told from alternating viewpoints, Lola Shoneyin gives her readers just enough to keep the story moving, uncovering small angles of the story with each chapter. We learn about each wife: Iya Segi, Iya Tope and Iya Femi as well as Bolanle and Babi Segi. Individually, their stories are a fascinating look at polygamous marriage and how they came to marry Babi Segi.

While the entire story was engaging, I found the first three wives to be horrible, conniving and distrustful. I didn't like them, even as I learned their "backstories." Baba Segi was even less likeable. Bonanle was the saving grace, and I was usually relieved when I learned the next chapter would be told from her point of view. The ending was sad - unnecessarily tragic - and I let out a big sigh when I finished this book. All in all, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives was just an average read for me. Be sure to check out others' reviews, though, before deciding to read this book. ( )

FTC Disclosure: This book was sent to me by the publisher for review on my blog.

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Jayme)

Title:  A Visit From the Goon Squad

Author:  Jennifer Egan
Published: 2010, Borzoi Book - Alfred A. Knopf
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Accolades: 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award, long list for 2011 Orange Prize

A Visit From the Goon Squad is a novel that is written as a collection of stories that center around Bennie Salazar a music executive, his kleptomaniac assistant Sasha and the people that weave in and out of their flawed lives. Each chapter is a story that moves through the timeline of Bennie and Sasha's lives and as readers we witness the moments that changed them.

A Visit From the Goon Squad has received critical acclaim, but somewhat mixed reviews from the "everyday" reader.  I understand the division. This book is difficult to pinpoint and to categorize - just writing the first paragraph of this review was hard because it is a difficult book to explain.  But I will tell you that I loved it.  The writing is crisp, honest, and inventive.  There are proses in this book that are so vivid and accurate that I had to stop and read them again and again.

"It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth."  page 60

Time is a key element to the story (The Goon Squad is a reference to time) - it is always there hovering over the characters and they each feel its impact as it changes their relationships, values, and themselves. The book weaves back and forth through a time span of about 50 years starting in the 1970's and ending in a somewhat dystopian 2020.  My favorite chapter is the chapter that is written as a power point by a teenager of today. It is so in the moment - our current time - it is brilliant.

A Visit From the Goon Squad is a remarkable, strangely moving story about the one thing we can't escape - the impact of time.

My Rating:  5 out of 5

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives - Wendy's Review

“Wipe your eyes,” she said, passing me a rag. “It has been a month since your parents died. This is not your home and it will never be. A girl cannot inherit her father’s house because it is everyone’s prayer that she will marry and make her husband’s home her own. This house and everything in it now belongs to your uncle. That is the way things are.” – from The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, page 135 -

Bolanle is Baba Segi’s fourth wife in a polygamous marriage. She is educated and young, and is a threat to the other wives in more ways than one. When she fails to conceive a child, Baba Segi is bereft and begins to seek answers which may uncover the biggest secret his wives have kept from him yet. Told in multiple and alternating viewpoints, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives explores the polygamist society of Nigeria by gradually revealing the secrets of the women who people the novel.

Iya Segi is the first wife – large and outspoken, she is the unofficial power beneath Baba Segi’s roof. Her plan to humiliate Bolanle and drive her from their home gets lukewarm support from Iya Femi, the third wife who has vengeance on her mind and who would rather see a quicker solution to the problem.

When a plan does not go right, you plot again. One day you will get it right. One day you will be able to damage the person who hurts you so completely that they will never be able to recover. I have told Iya Segi this on several occasions. I keep telling her that we need to find a permanent solution but she does not have wisdom. – from The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, page 74 -

Iya Tope is the second wife, a woman whose compassion is silenced by fear. Forced into an arranged marriage to Baba Segi, Iya Tope has learned to be humble and silent in the face of wrong doing.

As the story unfolds, the lives of each of these women intersect and come together to reveal the larger family of Baba Segi. Other characters are introduced, including Taju, the driver who also harbors a secret, and the many children who live in the house. Although Lola Shoneyin breaks up each person’s narrative by chapter, I found many of the characters’ voices to be interchangeable, and so sometimes I found myself struggling to keep all their stories straight in my mind.

Thematically, the novel probes the rights of women in a polygamist society and in Africa in general. Baba Segi is a self-important, chauvinistic man who sees Bolanle’s inability to conceive solely her fault. His view of sex is all about his own pleasure and he refers to it in crass terms. In general, sex is not portrayed as all that desirable – for the most part, it is represented as a wifely duty for the women with the point being to produce children. Sex for pleasure is largely punished and a source of guilt in the novel.

Shoneyin shows the inequality of women in her book, and all but Bolanle are portrayed as conniving, manipulative and vengeful. It made me wonder how accurate the novel is with regard to women in African society. Ultimately, Shoneyin provides for some redemption and forgiveness in her book about family secrets, betrayal, and disloyalty.

I found this to be an easy book to read. The individual stories are laced with myth, parables and folk lore. I enjoyed the gradual revealing of each character’s secret – a bit like peeling the layers off of an onion. Shoneyin managed to surprise me a bit with Baba Segi’s character who is so stereotypical at the outset, but managed to grow into a person who had depth and empathy by the end of the book.

The plot of this book is original, although the characters felt a little bit undeveloped to me. Shoneyin captures the flavor of a paternalistic society well.

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives was nominated for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and will appeal to readers who enjoy African literature.

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Jamrach's Menagerie - Wendy's Review

A mile from the shoal we hove to. A ghostly feather appeared, far, far out to sea, just for a second, and my heart was beating very very fast. Tim, down from his eyrie, ran over to me, out of breath. “This is it.” He could hardly get it out. “This is it, this it, Jaf,” he said and gripped my hand hard. My mouth had gone dry. – from Jamrach’s Menagerie -

Jaffy Brown is growing up on the streets of London in the late nineteenth century. He is a fearless eight year old when he encounters a Bengal tiger on the street, reaches up to pet it on the nose, and ends up dangling from the tiger’s mouth. That experience introduces Jaffy to a man named Jamrach and his menagerie of animals found around the world. Jaffy is invited to work for Jamrach where he befriends Tim, a boy a bit older than him whose competitive nature causes some strain in the friendship. When both boys are given the opportunity to find and capture a sea dragon as part of a three year whaling expedition, they do no hesitate to sign on to the adventure. What unfolds is an experience which will indelibly change their lives as they brave the unforgiving power of the sea together.

Carol Birch’s Orange Prize nominated novel of a young street urchin’s coming of age on a whaling boat is filled with quirky characters who are not always likable. The book is narrated by an adult Jaffy who is looking back on his boyhood years, and so there is an adult feel to this tale of youth. Early on, Birch establishes the uneasy friendship between Tim and Jaffy. The early chapters are devoted to the boys’ time in London and is filled with descriptions of the rough city streets. I found the early going slow paced, but when Birch begins the saga of the whaling expedition, the novel picks up considerably.

Birch’s writing is highly descriptive and allows for a solid sense of place.

The sea lapped over the transom, poured up the deck and swirled about the submerged companionways, and a colossal shift took place in the heart of the ship as three or four hundred barrels of oil moved as one with a sound like the end of all days. Sound: the sea, the wild wind, the voices of our crew as the brittle, wooden speck we lived on rolled over like the slippery pole at the fair, and the sky flew up as the swingboat soared. – from Jamrach’s Menagerie -

The latter half of Jamrach’s Menagerie is not for the faint of heart. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but I will say that the themes of survival and sacrifice are strong. Many of the images in this part of the novel are disturbing and graphic. There were times I set the book aside and was not eager to pick it back up again.

I have mixed feelings about Jamrach’s Menagerie. I found the middle part of the novel compelling and fast paced, a nice change from the first part of the book which dragged for me. Some of the latter parts were a bit too graphic for my liking. On the other hand, Birch is skilled at developing her characters and setting the scene. She brings to life the glory, pain, and terror which were found on the whaling ships in the late nineteenth century. Jamrach’s Menegarie is, at its heart, a sea adventure.

Readers who enjoy a good yarn and want to experience life on the high seas through the eyes of a young boy, might want to give this one a try. Birch peels back the skin of her characters and exposes their emotions in a raw and dark way that is hard to read at times. Perhaps it is this which makes this book the most memorable for me.

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Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (Jill)

Journey to Swamplandia and meet the Bigtree family - a clan of alligator wrestlers and theme park owners whose existence depends on gullible tourists desiring to see the unbelievable. The Bigtrees' lives turn upside down, however, when Hilola Bigtree dies from ovarian cancer. Hilola was the main attraction - a petite woman who could tape shut an alligator's mouth in 30 seconds and swan dive into a pit of alligators unscathed. While Hilola's death takes a toll on the park, it most profoundly affects her surviving family - her husband Chief and children Kiwi, Osceola and Ava.

With the park losing tourists and their home missing Hilola, the remaining Bigtree family begins a fast deterioration. Kiwi runs off the mainland to find work at a competing theme park to help pay off Swamplandia's debts, while Chief takes one of his long business trips. Osceola, enjoying newfound freedom, becomes fascinated with spiritualism and believes she can date ghosts - to the point where she runs off one night to elope with a ghost named Louis Thanksgiving.

That leaves 13-year-old Ava alone - until The Bird Man arrives. Allegedly hired to help locals clear off birds from their islands, Ava befriends The Bird Man, and together they begin a several-day journey to a place called The Underworld to find Osceola and bring her home.

The majority of the book is told from Ava's perpsective, and true to her age, she sees things in a naive way. As the story progresses, her naivete turns to scorching reality. The reader sees what's coming, but young Ava does not. The last 100 pages of Swamplandia! will have you turning the pages in dread, hoping your worst fears for this young heroine do not come true.

It would be easy to dismiss this book as too fantastic with ghost lovers and swamp living, but Karen Russell does a tremendous job making it all seem very real. Her ability to describe the people and places of Swamplandia suck you into a vortex that you don't want to leave until the last page is read. At the heart of it all, Swamplandia! is a coming of age tale that focuses on the love of family. With its gothic feel and Florida setting, I enjoyed this story and can't wait to read more by this talented young writer. ( )

Side note:

Swamplandia! is set in Florida's Ten Thousand Islands - an area in southwest Florida that is largely uninhabited and teeming with Florida nature. While you may not want to visit Ten Thousand Islands in person (bugs and alligators abound!), you can take a virtual visit online. Enjoy!

The London Train - Wendy's Review

[...] it was remarkable, he thought, how little mark the tumult of inward experience leaves on the external shells we inhabit. - from The London Train, page 315 -

Paul is grieving the death of his elderly mother and feels oddly detached from his wife, Elise, and their two small daughters. When he gets a frantic call from his ex-wife that their daughter, Pia, has disappeared, Paul boards a train from his home in Cardiff, Wales in order to travel to London in search of her. He finds Pia pregnant and living with her Polish boyfriend and her boyfriend’s sister, Anna, in a rundown flat. Inexplicably drawn to Anna, Paul eventually abandons his family in Wales and moves into Pia’s flat in London.

In a parallel story, Cora finds herself disenfranchised with her marriage to the much older Robert. She leaves him in London and moves back to her childhood home in Wales which she inherited after the death of her parents. When she learns that Robert has gone missing, she rushes back to London in search of him.

The London Train is about these two characters. What appears to be divergent stories, eventually weave together through a series of flashbacks, memories, and the unexpected crossing of paths during a train ride. The first half of the book follows Paul’s journey through grief and loss, betrayal and abandonment. The second half of the book, which I found much more compelling, examines Cora’s life shortly after her mother’s death and the disintegration of her marriage. It is through Cora’s story that the reader discovers the connection between Paul and Cora.

Tessa Hadley’s prose is subtle. Her narrative ebbs and flows, giving glimpses into the lives of her characters, revealing their flaws and fears, showing us their daily lives and how a chance meeting reverberates beyond them to touch the lives of those closest to them.

They were all of them sleepwalking to the edge of a great pit, like spoiled trusting children, believing they would always be safe, be comfortable. - from The London Train, page 90 -

Thematically, the novel centers around grief and loss, and how we cover our emotional wounds. The journey through grief is symbolically captured in the relentless, monotonous movement of the London train – it moves forward and back, from London to Wales, and back to London – just as our emotions click back and forth from loss to recovery. Interestingly, the effect this had on me as a reader was almost hypnotic. The characters’ feelings are strangely muted at times – a disconcerting thing in the face of their great losses and dislocation.

With the loss of her parents behind her, and the loss of the babies she might have had ahead, she was withdrawn out of the past and future into this moment of herself, like a barren island, or a sealed box. - from The London Train, page 234 -

The London Train is a very slow moving novel. I must admit, the first half of the book dragged for me. I did not particularly like Paul, a man whose narcissism causes him to cheat on his wife, then abandon her and his children. Even when he returns to Elise, he seems to lack any understanding as to how his behavior has injured her. Luckily, the second half the book, which focuses on Cora, was better paced. Cora, although also seriously flawed and only marginally more likeable, was a character whose struggles were more relate-able to me. Cora’s grief over the loss of her mother, her inability to have children, and her loneliness were believable, and Cora becomes a more empathetic character as her story unfolds.

Overall, I found The London Train to be a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, I enjoyed some of the subtlety of the novel, and Hadley’s writing drew me in. On the other hand, the pace was so slow at times, and the characters so unlikeable (especially Paul), that I found my mind drifting – I wanted these characters to just get on with their lives, figure it out, and stop being so selfish.

The London Train was long listed for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction.

Readers who enjoy literary fiction and subtle writing styles might want to give The London Train a try. Read other reviews of this book by following the links on the TLC Book Tour page.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Tessa Hadley is the author of The Master Bedroom, Sunstroke and Other Stories, Everything Will Be All Right, and Accidents in the Home. Sunstroke and Other Stories was a New York Times Notable Book of 2007, and Accidents in the Home was long-listed for The Guardian’s First Book Award. She lives in Cardiff, Wales, and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University.

The Seas by Samantha Hunt

The Seas
By Samantha Hunt
Completed April 12, 2011

In Samantha Hunt's debut novel, The Seas, we meet a lovely, yet delusional, 19-year-old girl who believes she is a mermaid. Her father told her so, shortly before he walked into the sea and never returned. Clinging to this belief, our narrator takes us on a lyrical ride that shows how tough our world is on mermaids.

A major theme in The Seas is unrequited love. For example, our narrator is in love with Jude, a Gulf War veteran who was 13 years older than her. Jude would hang out with her, protect her at times, but never date her. Jude was emotionally scarred, and he drank heavily and screwed around to hide his issues. The narrator's mom also was caught up in unrequited love. She finally met the man of her dreams, married and bore his child, before he took a walk into the water, Virginia Woolfe-style. The tiny glimpses of their marriage showed us their uneven romance, which lived on long after the dad's disappearance.

The Seas is not your ordinary little book. It's humorous, enchanting, troubling and depressing. While the narrator's delusions of being a mermaid were quaint, at the same time, you wish someone would help her. While you knew Jude was bad news, you hoped he would pay attention to the narrator. This tumbling combination of feelings makes The Seas as quirky and wonderful as its characters.

The best way to make a recommendation would be this: if you liked Little Miss Sunshine, then you will probably like The Seas. Just like the movie, this book won't be for everyone. ( )

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

It takes a talented writer to infuse stories of folklore and reality into a book that’s both captivating and realistic. It’s not an easy recipe for storytelling, but sometimes the best stories are the hardest ones to tell. I think that’s the case in Tea Obreht’s debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife.

Set in unnamed Balkan nations, The Tiger’s Wife tells the story of Natalia, a young physician who is traveling to an orphanage to inoculate wartime orphans. En route, she learns of her grandfather’s death. Natalia knew her grandfather was ill with cancer, so his death came as no surprise, but she was stunned to learn where her grandfather died – in a little village near the orphanage where she was headed. Why was he there instead of at home with Natalia’s grandmother and mother?

As Natalia contemplates her grandfather’s death, she reminisces about his life – specifically stories from his childhood and youth. There’s the Tiger’s Wife – a young deaf-mute woman from his village – and the Deathless Man – who captures souls before people die. Even further, you learn about the village butcher, apothecary and local bear killer. Here’s where Obreht shines: the retelling of folkloric stories, the conjuring of superstition and the devastations of war. In these tales, which are woven through Natalia’s narrative, the reader must employ patience and suspend some level of disbelief. In doing so, you will be rewarded with stories that will enrich and delight you.

The rhythm of The Tiger’s Wife takes some getting used to. Stylistically, it’s a complicated novel with interweaving story lines and time frames. Even writers with more experience could lose themselves in this storytelling. The fact that Obreht didn’t is a testament to her writing talent. I would recommend The Tiger’s Wife to readers who enjoy folklore with contemporary fiction. I look forward to future stories by this talented young writer. ( )