August was a wonderful month, and I read many great books! I put my top five at the top of the list. I read in the back yard during several sunny afternoons, with my dog lounging in the sunny grass near my feet. This is the life, and as I write this during the last day of my summer break, with the sun slanting low through the window and onto my papers, I already feel nostalgia.
Love Letters is a YA book that recounts the school year in the life of a troubled teen. Laurel is assigned by her English teacher to write a letter to a dead person. (That’s not why I loved the book; the teacher is a very minor character.) She never turns it in, but writes many letters and they document her traumas, as written to some of her heroes, including Judy Garland, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Elizabeth Bishop, Keats. The book deals with pain, grief, and healing and she learns about identity, her peers, and family. The cover had a blurb by Stephen Chbosky (Perks of Being a Wallflower) and this book was of the same caliber. I expect many teens might agree.
Awards for epistolary novels would have to include another I read this month. (Have you read Ella Minnow Pea? It’s a clever and funny example of how to write a novel in letters!) Sister, another favorite this month, is framed as a letter to the narrator’s dead sister. While the letter is occasionally interrupted, it maintains a warm sense of the narrator and audience. Beatrice flies to London from NYC when she hears her sister has gone missing, and leaves behind her commercially successful life, in which she had always met others’ expectations. Insisting the police are wrong in determining her sister’s death a suicide, our narrator hunts for who could have killed her sister. In the course of her search, she changes. The book is filled with lovely specific details which occasionally become symbolic. This is a character novel, with not just a flawed sister, but also their mother, whose grief transforms her.
Greta Wells tells a good, but very unusual, story. Greta decides to try electric shock therapy to help her recover from grief over her brother’s death. With each treatment she time travels, either to the ‘10s and the ‘40s. The message –that pain and rejuvenation are necessary to a full life — may not be surprising or new, but the lives, the details of time and place, are. Characters like her brother, her aunt, and her partner/husband appear in all the time periods, but some are changed by the demands of the time. For example, in the earlier days her brother hides his sexual orientation in marriage. The writing and perspective is always contemporary, though the setting is usually historic N.Y.C.
Blackman’s Prisoner is a Munich teenager ‘adopted’ by Hitler. As he rises to power, her certainties about him, the Party, and her own family are shaken by a young Jewish man. The story would be accessible to those who don’t know much about this history, with lots of descriptions of place and time, not too many historical figures. Reading this novel should spark curiosity of history, psychology, and propaganda. Gretchen, the protagonist, shows the bravery required of an modern heroine as she faces harsh truths and life threatening dangers, and romance.
I finally read Larson’s non-fiction account of the same time and place, In the Garden of Beasts. His story has a tight focus on 2 people, uncertain of the significance of events they hear of or witness. Dodd and his daughter only slowly revise their initially positive view of Hitler and the Nazis. Many of the pages capture their initial delight with Berlin and the Tiergarten park, and the books ends soon after they are both thoroughly disillusioned. Dodd eventually reprimands Hitler and after his ambassador position ends, warns others of Hitler’s military and evil intentions. A neophyte diplomat and an out-of-place college professor, Dodd is not a good ambassador and definitely not part of the ‘insider club’ usually represented by ambassadors. The U.S. government was worried primarily about recouping its loans to Germany, and replaced Dodd after a year with a new ambassador to Germany. Dodd’s warnings of Hitler’s ambitions were ignored.
Far Far Away grabbed me in two days of driven reading. A teenage boy, with a father who never gets out of bed, is helped by a ghost. This ghost narrates the story, and he is one of the Brothers Grimm. The genre is contemporary coming of age, with fairy-tale-like hopes pinned on winning a t.v. competition show. The books directly draws from many fairy tales, and its own plot (spoiler alert?) is like one Grimm might have documented. O.K., in this book, he does. Grimm voice itself is very knowledgeable, old-fashioned in syntax and vocabulary, and often perplexed by the teenage protagonist, and an unusual and effective choice.
Aubyn’s story centers around the process of determining the winner of a literary prize (quite like the Booker). Not enough funny books are written, I believe, and this was a lark. Chapters follow the judges and the writers through the competition year. Judges include former politicians, a retired secretary who only reads reluctantly, and a college professor (the most reasonable voice, but a didactic workaholic). Every character is an extreme of a type, and their thoughts and actions are absurdly selfish and funny. Excerpts from the books in competition are likewise absurd exaggerations of popular writings. I enjoyed the satire, I laughed aloud several times, and I imagine the author did too.
This month, many of the books I read were great stories with interesting narrators! I am not a paid advertiser, yet I hope I have led you to try one!
Bookshelf Picks of a Librarian 