Modoc: The True Story of the Greatest Elephant That Ever Lived by Ralph Helfer

This story starts with the birth of a boy and a girl. A human and an elphant. Born at the exact same time on the same farm, from the beginning their futures were together. Modoc tells of the amazing journey of this pair from life to death, beginning to end. Filled with heart-wrenching hi's and low's, before the end you'll have used a full box of Kleenex at least.

Bram (the boy) and Modoc (the elephant) travel all over the world. Their status changes from lowly son of a circus elephant trainer to stowaway, from fugitive to star. It even weaves the author's own part in this epic into the tale of life and death.

Modoc is a fantastic novel from start to finish and definitely worth the read.

The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry

The Whitney women can all read lace, but Towner Whitney doesn't want any part of it, and has left Salem Massachusetts and Yellow Dog Island to get away from all the bad memories of her childhood home and the lace readings. Living in L.A. she has no intention of returning.

The book starts when she receives a call from her brother telling her that her 80-something-year-old Great Aunt Eva is missing and she must return home. Towner is recovering from a surgical procedure and had been thinking of the gift that her Great Aunt Eva had recently sent to her. It was a lace-making pillow, used for making Ipswich lace. The lace making and the reading of lace had been a tradition of the Whitney women, and Towner was no exception. Although she wants no part of it anymore, she loves her aunt and feels she has to face her bad memories and go home. Salem and Yellow Dog Island are places filled with fearful bad memories.

Towner returns after being away for over 15 years and is immediately entrenched in all the troubles of the past. It is interesting to follow the writing of author Barry as she writes through the eyes of Towner, who sometimes lives in her dreams of the past. The story is kept fresh with trying to determine if what Towner is thinking is real, or the memories from childhood twisted over time.

Of course there is the love interest in Rafferty, the detective who is assigned to the case, as well as all the other quirky characters. Salem women who are Witches and selling their wares in the small shops on the square, and the women of Yellow Dog Island and their lace, making kept this book moving along nicely.

The Lace Reader is quite an interesting book. Brunonia Barry pulled me in right away with her way of including an excerpt from The Lace Readers Guide, at the beginning of each chapter. The Salem history, entwined with the story of Towner and the strange group of characters kept me glued to this book to the end.

Women, lace, and a missing older lady makeup an interesting read.

On Agate Hill by Lee Smith

This is what 13 year old Molly Petree is doing when we meet her in 1872...living in a house filled with the ghosts of her dead family. Having lost her father and brothers in the Civil War, and her mother a few years later, Molly is left to live with her aunt Fannie and Uncle Junius. Well, after her Aunt Fannie's death during childbirth, her Uncle Junius goes into a deep state of depression, and gets very ill. Not in his normal state of mind anymore, he marries the housekeeper, and drives away his sister who has come to help. Then, upon his death, Molly is left to live with her new step-aunt Sabrina and her children...that is until a mysterious man takes her from Agate Hill, and enrolls her in Gatewood Academy School for Girls.

From there we follow Molly's life... through her four years at Gatewood, teaching at a small mountain-top school, runnin off and gettin married, the heartache of not being able to have children, a horrible fire and mysterious death, learning who the stranger that took her away from Agate Hill all those years ago really is, and why he's never let Molly very far out of his sight, and finally, old age. Molly's story is told through diary entries, court documents, and letters to a dear friend, which I really liked. It gives the story a personal feel.

Overall, I just loved this book, and I absolutely recommend it. This is one of those books that you just hate to put down, and while only a couple parts here and there were slow-going, I looked forward to reading this every chance that I got. This was my first time reading Ms. Smith but it sure won't be my last. Molly's story was so vivid and real that I had to keep telling myself it was a fiction novel.

Stealing Buddha's Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner is a memoir by Bich Minh Nguyen, teacher of Asian American literature, creative nonfiction, and fiction at Purdue University. Nguyen’s father, sister, grandmother, and uncles left Vietnam the night before the fall of Saigon. After spending some time in the Philippines, the received a sponsor in Grand Rapids, MI to come to the United States, where Bich’s father eventually met and married Rosa, a woman of Mexican heritage. Growing up in a bi-cultural family was difficult for Bich in white, middle-class (as it was at the time) Grand Rapids. Her family’s food, traditions, and ways of thinking were markedly different from those of her not-so-understanding classmates.

The book was definitely different than I expected. I committed the age-old sin of judging the book by its cover and believed that the book would focus predominantly Nguyen’s rejection of her family’s culture through a desire for American junk food and distaste for traditional food. This was both not quite accurate and not quite as predominant a theme as I had guessed. Nguyen’s desire for ‘American’ food seems to be more about understanding and wanting to fit in with her peers. She definitely does not reject the food her grandmother makes, she simply seems to wish that her family could also eat pork chops, roasts, and hamburger helper.

This book was organized differently from most of the memoirs I’ve been reading lately. There was only a very general narrative flow. Nguyen began at the ‘beginning’ and ended at the ‘end’, but the middle chapters jumped around a good bit, organized more by theme than by chronology. This could have easily gotten annoying and was, at some points, slightly confusing, but Bich generally did a good job at providing ages or other sign posts to indicate where you were in her story. The beginning of the book was definitely stronger than the end – there is a conclusion that you as a reader are not really prepared for in the book and isn’t fully explained. However, it is perhaps more authentic that way, it does not seem that Bich was prepared for this resolution either, although I’m not totally sure how it enriched her story of a child’s immigrant experience. Overall I enjoyed this book; it was a fast and engaging read.

Book Review: Paint It Black by Janet Fitch

Ok I get it, Josie. You're small, pretty, ...whorish. Yes and your little brat boyfriend killed himself...and his mother is moody...blah blah blah. Your car is a piece of crap, you go to punk clubs, you cry alot, every little thing reminds you of Michael and you spend 2 freaking pages describing it, just before devoting another 4 pages to more of the same.

I've been skipping pages 2 or 3 at a time, scanning for something lurking in a paragraph somewhere that may be in any way different from the 2 chapters before it. All I've found is bits and pieces of plot here and there, and more redundant blabbering about her poor poor dead boyfriend and her pathetic little life.

While I really tried to like this book, I only made it to page 176 and finally gave up. Maybe I'm too old for this type of story...but all the booze-swilling, drug activity and other drivel really got on my nerves.

Usually I hate putting down a book without at least finding out what happens in the end, but for this one I could honestly care less. I need likeable characters (I can only really get into a book if I can either identify with or find interest in at least ONE character), I need an actual plot!

This book has offered neither. I loved White Oleander...but I wonder what Fitch was thinking with this one.

Anna Quindlen - Rise and Shine

Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen opens with the sentence, "From time to time some stranger will ask me how I can bear to live in New York City." The rest of the novel is like an exposition answering this stranger's question. Sure, there is a plot. There is a story about two sisters and how one's fame and public mistake affects the other. There are romantic relationships. Things happen. But there is so much commentary on life in New York City between the action that I am not sure which fills more pages. If you live in New York, and especially if you are around people in Manahattan who are extremely preoccupied with professional success, you may love this book. I didn't.

The main character in Rise and Shine, Bridget, is interesting. I enjoyed the parts about her job in the Bronx a lot. I also liked her assistant, Tequila. The parts of the book when Bridget was dealing with work, her romantic relationship or her surrogate mother role to her nephew, Leo, were good reading.

The novel revolves, however, around Bridget's famous sister, Meghan. I was never convinced that Meghan's on-air mistake would be as huge a deal as it is written to be. Meghan also was underdeveloped, making her impact less than it needed to be in order to understand Bridget's transformation.

The passing of time in the book is also confusing. It sometimes read as if a day or two had passed and then suddenly someone would mention it was a month later. This made it hard to follow.

This is not Quindlen's best.

Book Review: Snow Falling on Cedars

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson is the story of a small community on an island off Washington state, about ten years after the end of WWII. Though the island is isolated, its population is ethnically diverse. The main action of the story, however, takes place between Caucasians and Japanese, as a Japanese man, Kabuo Miyamoto, is standing trial for the murder of a fellow fisherman. Adding to this conflict is the tension between the local newspaper owner, Ishmael Chambers, and his boyhood sweetheart, a Japanese girl named Hatsue, who is now the wife of the accused Kabuo. Snow Falling on Cedars has several themes and elements that readily commend it to be read.

First, the book is a story of how racism affects a small, isolated community. Both Ishmael and Kabuo fought for America during WWII, and both men are crippled by the war, but in different ways: Ishamel by the loss of an arm, Kabuo by the distrust immediately after WWII that whites held against anyone of Japanese descent. The story deals with the unfortunate internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, portraying (evidently accurately) what internees (prisoners) experienced in the camps.

Second, Snow Falling on Cedars is an intense love story, as Ishmael has never resolved his lost romance with Hatsue. As the community's newspaper man, he is in the awkward position of having to deal fairly, as a news man, with the very man who denied him a life with the girl he loves.

Third, the story is well-crafted. The prose is such that the reader feels the cold from the ubiquitous snow that sets the mood for most of the story. One feels the stuffiness of small rooms heated by over-active steam radiators. The reader will feel the frustration of the courtroom drama, as the opposing attorneys seem unable to arrive at the truth. And one wonders if Ishmael will go forth with the evidence that will determine the fate of Kabuo and the possibility of his own relationship with Hatsue.

The main narrative technique of the story is the memory, as the narration alternates between past and present (seamlessly, most of the time), and the reader is shown how the horrors of WWII has affected the lives of the ordinary men who went to fight.

Snow Falling on Cedars is a very good read, but I recommend it for more mature readers, as some of the scenes, though tastfully done, are nonetheless unsuitable for young readers. Disturbing and bittersweet, Snow Falling on Cedars forces us to confront racism and to ask ourselves what we would do in the same situation.