One of the perennial questions writers tend to rehash is whether or not to create an outline before starting to write. Many writers proudly announce that they have no idea where their stories are going when they begin; they follow where the story takes them and claim that this technique gives their work spontaneity and emotional depth. Other writers create quite detailed outlines and then proceed to follow them. I recently attended a workshop led by a successful author who mapped out her novels scene by scene and, posting this blueprint over her desk, checked off each scene as she completed it. The advantages she mentioned included a solid structure for the book and the freedom to jump around and work on any scene she felt like. Most writers, including myself, fit somewhere in between. I create an outline but feel free to revamp it as I go along. I stay open to the idea that the story will take off in a direction I hadn’t anticipated.

This book, which I so looked forward to, reads as though the author adhered to his outline too faithfully. It is a beautifully structured book, one of those novels that follows some artifact, like a violin or a manuscript, across the years as it passes from one set of hands to another. In this case, it is a house, a modern house built in Czechoslovakia in the 1920s by newlyweds Liesl and Viktor, a Gentile and a Jew. Their house is to have the clean lines and austere palette of the Bauhaus. An abstract house, the architect calls it, a house for the future based on the ideal of reason and the possibility of perfection. A house that does away with all the fustian of the Victorian Age that brought the tragedy of the Great War.

Of course we all know what is coming. That is one of the flaws in the author’s plan. One member of my book club said that she could hardly bear to go on reading knowing what was waiting around the corner. For me, if you’re going to bring Hitler and the Holocaust into your book, you’d better write a darn good story, not only because they’ve been so overdone, but because they seem to me the hallmarks of a lazy writer, coming as they do with their own built-in drama, their guaranteed heartbreak. It can be done—Anne Michaels succeeds brilliantly in Fugitive Pieces —but it is not easy. I think Mawer comes close, but ultimately fails to meet the challenge.

I found it a cold book; some members of my book club agreed while others loved the book. I enjoyed the book on a cerebral level. For example, I appreciated the masterful architecture of the story. As one person pointed out, literary ironies abound: a transparent house that is full of secrets, a woman who blinds herself to what is going on and eventually loses her sight. Part of the problem is the structure. As the house passes to other hands, we lose the people who have started to interest us and are given a whole new set of characters to get to know. Then it happens again. Perhaps that is the author’s intent, that we should not care what happens to the characters and all that Romantic nonsense. But I found myself thinking of Storm Jameson’s memoir that dealt with this period and was so much more moving. The betrayal of Czechoslovakia must count as one of England’s most terrible crimes. Here it is acknowledged but is only another example of passion trumping reason.

Another flaw for me, and this is just personal taste, is that I am so bored with stories by middle-aged men about middle-aged men who are justified in cheating on their wives. With all the passions to choose from, especially during this period of national fervor and lingering grief, it seems odd to go back to the same plot device over and over.

I loved the first scene, when an elderly Liesl returns to the house after decades in the U.S. Almost completely blind, she yet walks unassisted, the house so much a part of her that its spaces and scents do not have to be parsed for her to know where she is. I have a house like that in my past, one that appears in my dreams, that I can walk through step by step, calling up the smell of each room, the sound each window makes, the rough texture of each wall. Now there’s a passion you don’t see very often. It is more than love; it is immersion, and Mawer captures it perfectly. Many scenes in the story are beautifully done and, though the ending falls a bit flat, I am still glad I read the book.

Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese Zero, its gas tank hit, crash-lands on the small island of Nihau. The Hawaiians who live there know nothing of the outside world, unaware even that a war is going on. Although they are only a few miles from Kauai, the paternalistic haole owner of the island, Aylmer Robinson, carrying on his father's tradition, has forbidden newspapers, telephones, radios and visits from the outside world. He even discourages literacy and the English language in an attempt to protect the islanders, childlike and innocent in his view, from the wickedness of the outside world.

Therefore, the Hawaiians welcome the young pilot, patching his wounds and singing for him, though Howard Kaleohano, the man who found him, has, almost accidentally, removed the pilot’s gun and papers. While they fear his anger at finding a stranger on Nihau, they want only for the godlike Mr. Robinson to come and deal with the intruder. In mutual incomprehension, the pilot and the islanders crowded into Howard’s house talk past each other, until the elderly Japanese beekeeper, Shintani, is fetched. He listens to the pilot speak, but backs away saying that he does not understand the dialect.

The call goes up to fetch Yoshio Harada, a nisei hired by Mr. Robinson to run the ranch house. Though born on Kauai where half the population was of Japanese descent, Yoshio has suffered all his life, but especially during a stint in California, from the humiliations and abuses of racial prejudice. Only on Nihau does he feel that he has finally landed among people who accept him for who he is. This comfortable life is thrown into chaos when he is brought before the pilot, who tells him that the Japanese have destroyed Pearl Harbor. Yoshio comes to believe that the Japanese have taken the entire island and gone on to invade Kauai, with little Nihau being next. He struggles to decide which course of action will best protect these people whom he has come to love.

Paul tells the story, which is based on true events, in lusciously simple prose, capturing the characters, their dilemmas, and the hard beauty of the island. Yoshio’s conflicting thoughts and motivations are particularly well-presented. I found each of his disastrous steps perfectly believable. The pilot, too, a mere boy, is vividly drawn, as he is presented with a conflict between his simple belief in obedience to the Emperor and his desire to go home to his girlfriend. I loved his boyish enthusiasm when Howard teaches him to surf. I closed the book overwhelmed once again with the wreckage that war leaves in its wake, even is such a remote corner as Nihau. The hysterical response to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which Paul captures so well, is a grim reminder of what has happened in this country over the last decade.

I found myself thinking about paradises. Robinson, a devout Christian, believes that innocence—which he understands to be ignorance—is the chief characteristic of paradise. After all, it was eating of the Tree of Knowledge that got Adam and Eve tossed out on their ears. This is how he justifies his isolation of the population on the island he owns. While his paternalism is, of course, despicable, I wondered if the idea held any merit. After all, when my children were little, I tried to be careful in feeding them knowledge of the world’s evil, enough to protect them but not enough to give them bad dreams.

Yet for me, ignorance is the opposite of paradise. Even as a small child, I hated not knowing what was out there. The huge black holes in my understanding of the world terrified me, and I felt as though I lived in one of those ancient maps, where the earth is a small flat island, surrounded by huge seas that eventually cascaded off the edge of the world.

Knowledge gives us the ability to know what is out there. It enables us to think critically about what we are told instead of simply accepting everything at face value. It keeps us from being the willing pawns of men like the Emperor and Mr. Robinson. My paradise is not a lost one; it is one that I enter further into every day, with every new thing that I learn.

I hope many people read this novel, a small story, perhaps, of a handful of people trapped in a dilemma not of their choosing, but a story that has deeper resonances and a satisfying conclusion.

As Prince and Princess of Wales, Freddy and Fredericka are a constant embarrassment to his mother, the Queen, and to the nation. Obviously based on Charles and Diana, the two create tabloid fodder wherever they go. Unfaithful Freddy does not love his wife, who cares only about fashion, shopping and her appearance. His own appearance is ludicrous enough, but his misadventures and bumbling make it worse. His words are taken out of context by a mocking press, and he is made to appear ridiculous in the eyes of his nation and the world, while Fredericka is universally praised and beloved no matter what she does, even when she gives a flagrantly inaccurate speech concocted for her by Freddy. Eventually their misadventures become so egregious that they are sent on a secret mission to the U.S., parachuting into an industrial wasteland in New Jersey with no possessions and clad only in furry bikinis.

Yes, that's the level of silliness. I've long enjoyed Helprin's books, but this comic novel is quite a departure. In the mode of Tristram Shandy or Don Quixote, the book makes no pretense at realism. It employs the classic quest story structure, well-known to us from King Arthur and from fairy tales where the son who is considered a bit of a doofus goes into the woods or climbs a beanstalk and manages to rescue the princess or kill the giant. Coincidences abound and events converge to drive the story. The structure has also been described as the hero's journey, as Helprin points out in the interview at the end of the book on my Recorded Books copy. Famously put forward by Joseph Campbell, the hero’s journey drives stories like The Odyssey and The Inferno. After all, as has been repeated so often that I've been unable to find who first pointed it out (though John Gardner's name is mentioned most often): there are only two kinds of stories: “Someone goes on a journey” and “A stranger comes to town.” As Scott Myers notes, both are contained in the hero's journey since usually it is a stranger coming to town who calls the hero into action (the journey).

I have long said that I have reservations about novels that include real people as characters or even characters created by other writers. Legal questions of copyright and libel aside, since copyrights expire and people in the public eye or deceased are considered fair game, the writer is presenting his or her version of that person. Obviously it is unethical, except in the case of satire, to deliberately show a version that the writer knows is untrue, e.g., that distorts the facts to whitewash or condemn the subject. But I question even well-meaning attempts. The image of the person or character becomes lodged in our minds and part of what we “know” about him or her. Having read Laurie R. King's and Michael Chabon's versions of Sherlock Holmes, I can no longer read the original stories the same way, yet both King and Chabon are excellent writers who I believe genuinely try to honor Arthur Conan Doyle's creation.

Several of the essays in The Offensive Internet mention the belief that some proponents of zero-privacy hold, that today's exposure prevents people from presenting themselves as someone other than who they are and this is a good thing because it keeps us honest. Without getting into the huge body of work on the identities people construct consciously or unconsciously to show to others, I will just say that I do not think it necessarily dishonest to show different facets of ourselves in different contexts, any more than it is dishonest to wear business attire to a meeting at work instead of a bathing suit, unless you’re a lifeguard of course.

What I do believe is that it is our responsibility as writers to consider what “truth” we are lodging our readers' minds. Helprin's obvious admiration for Freddy and disdain for Fredericka (“less intelligent than garden mulch”) must inevitably color readers' opinions of Charles and Diana. In the course of their quest, Freddy comes into his own as a brilliant and well-read man, equally adept at wilderness survival and swaying the multitudes with his speeches. Fredericka, on the other hand, finds her best self in cleaning toilets. Her only talent is a sort of idiot savant ability to spout versions of famous literary works which she has never read. This sort of bias turns the book into a polemic in favor of Charles and—for me at least—diminishes the comic charm.

Still, I enjoyed the book and got a lot of chuckles out of it. Luckily I listened to it in the car, where the simple-minded humor filled the niches of my attention perfectly. I don't think I would have gotten past the first chapter or two if I'd been reading it. While I appreciate the humor of crossed communication, the who's-on-first sequences go on too long for me. In fact, most of the comic sequences go on too long. I admit I'm not a fan of slapstick or farce, so those scenes were for me a dead loss. Even for those who enjoy such humor, some judicious cutting would have made the book a lot better. However, I applaud Helprin's departure from the realist focus of today's fiction and his attempts to resurrect the picaresque stories of the past.

Langston Braverman has come home to her small town of Haddington, Indiana, simply walking out of her PhD orals and abandoning that life and all its dreams. She takes refuge in the hot attic of her parents' home where she imagines that she is writing a novel. Or maybe an epic sonnet sequence. In reality she is mostly sleeping and contemplating the wreck of her life. In alternate chapters, we follow the town's minister, Amos Townsend, whose life has been a series of losses, each more grievous than the last. Both Amos and Langston find their lives transformed by the appearance of two damaged little girls.

I love the title and spent several days just pondering the words before opening the book. Kimmel says of the book that it is a retelling of A Confederacy of Dunces. It's been a while since I read that book, but I can certainly see Ignatius J. Reilly in Langston. She's almost annoyingly smart, confounding family and townspeople alike with her lectures on abstruse subjects. I can understand why one reviewer felt that the book bogged down in excessive references to religion, physics, psychology, and philosophy, and Langston herself one of the “most self-absorbed and annoying characters in recent memory. Langston, who seems perpetually mired in surly adolescence, cannot bear her reduced circumstances, finding every aspect of small town life excruciatingly insipid.”

However, I enjoyed Langston. I guess it helped that I have been rereading some of the subjects she expounds upon. Mostly I just enjoyed the way her mind works. Reading Kierkegaard in the hot attic, her thoughts begin to drift. “Langston closed her eyes, and her mind filled with images almost immediately, as if she were beginning to dream. She thought of Hermes Psychopompos, who leads us over thresholds: between life and death, between sleeping and waking. As the psychopomp, Hermes carries a staff of intertwining snakes.” And she's off on snakes and women and locusts.

I enjoyed following Amos about, too, though I struggled a bit at first with disentangling my mind from a Midwestern pastor named Ames in another novel that grapples with large ideas. Perhaps my next memoir will be titled Haunted by Books. From talking about big ideas, Solace gradually moves into playing them out in daily life. I adored the scenes between Langston and the girls, loving the way they talked to each other. I could have done with more about the unfolding of that relationship and also more about Langston's father, Walt, who sort of gets summed up at the end. But overall I liked the book a lot, finding it smart and funny and unexpected, just as I always found Kimmel's blog postings.

I mentioned recently that I’ve noticed bullying and abusive behavior on the Internet, and that blogs that I used to enjoy have had to be shut down. I'm not sure why Kimmel abandoned her popular blog in May of 2009, but given that there was no warning and the end came right after a lengthy post on a controversial subject, I suspect that she was targeted. It's a shame. Not only was Kimmel's blog fun and thought-provoking, it had become a gathering place for a community of people, addressed affectionately by Kimmel as her “blog babies”. Losing this online forum must have been detrimental to her career. There hasn't been a book from her since 2008's Iodine and I'm not finding any interviews or articles about her since the blog shut down. I hope she's just retired to a quiet place to do more writing and is not in hiding from cyber stalkers.

This book attracted my attention because I’ve long been interested in issues around privacy on the Internet. I’m often horrified by how casually people reveal personal information there, naively revealing things like birthdates and travel information. I’d have thought that most people knew by now that once something is on the Internet, it is there forever, and that modern search engines enable anyone to find it. People may not realise that employers and college admissions offices will look for and find that photo of a keg party or blog post about a sexual encounter. Some folks I’ve spoken with say they have nothing to hide or adopt a fatalistic attitude, assuming that privacy is impossible in an online world, yet I believe it is important to do what we can to protect ourselves.

I’ve also been conscious of much bullying and abusive behavior on the Internet, directed especially at women and minorities. Blogs that I used to enjoy have had to be shut down and some newspaper columnists no longer allow comments because of the vicious and threatening comments posted. Martha C. Nussbaum’s essay goes into detail about the causes and effects of misogyny and objectification of women. Brian Leiter recounts two examples of what he calls cyber-cesspools and the methods posters there use to ensure that their harassing and threatening posts are the first search results returned. Anonymity certainly contributes to the level of violence, and it is shocking how badly some people behave when they think no one will know who they are and there will be no retribution.

Essays in this book, which grew out of a conference, explore offensive behaviors on the Internet in three areas: reputation (how easily it can be damaged and what the personal, professional, and financial repercussions are), privacy (how the Internet enables gossip and false accusations to spread outside of our local communities), and speech (what speech is protected by First Amendment doctrine). The essays concentrate on what legal and political remedies could be deployed to protect non-public individuals.

I’ve followed the arguments of the large and vocal contingent who want the Internet to remain “free”, i.e., unregulated, so it is good to hear such a measured and intelligent response. For example, John Deigh’s essay includes a discussion of the classical defense for freedom of speech, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, going beyond the usual quotes to put them in the context of Mill’s argument. I appreciate the precision of the discussions, where terms are clearly defined and recommendations supported by carefully crafted arguments.

The essays are well-written and—I think—easy for the lay-person to understand, though this is a field where I have some expertise. Many of the essays gave me new insights such as Cass R. Sunstein’s essay which explores how informational cascades and group polarisation contribute to the spread of false rumours. For all the talk of a “marketplace of ideas”, few people will go against the beliefs of their group or the opinions that have already been voiced. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in these ideas.

Set just after WWII, Mudbound is the story of two families in rural Mississippi. Laura is gratefully married finally at the advanced age of 31. Her husband, Henry, has transplanted Laura and their two young daughters from Memphis to a remote farm with only a shack for a house, as he fulfills his long-time dream to own a farm. One of his tenant farmers, Hap Jackson, is proud to be working half-shares, knowing that sharecropping would mean keeping only a quarter of his crop, thus guaranteeing long-term indebtedness to the landlord. Hap's wife, Florence, a strong woman gifted with healing, overcomes her initial wariness to help the floundering Laura adjust to farm life. Relationships between these characters and between the two families, one white and one black, are complicated first by the arrival of Henry's abusive father, Pappy, to live with them and then by the return of two discharged soldiers: Henry's younger brother, Jamie, and Hap and Florence's son, Ronsel.

My book club liked this book, finding it an engrossing read. Most felt the author deployed foreshadowing and description well to create suspense and keep them reading to find out what would happen. However, a few found the story predictable, and the suspense a bit heavy-handed. Some people thought the author tried to force emotional response by pushing obvious buttons, such as the Holocaust and lynchings. A few were disappointed by the ending, saying that the writing, while excellent in the earlier parts, seemed rushed at the end.

For me as a writer, this is one of the great benefits of being in a book club: seeing how personal preferences and circumstances influence a reader's reaction to a book. Someone beleaguered by end-of-term papers and exams to grade may not have the time or energy to read as attentively as at other times, or may turn to a book for relaxation rather than full intellectual and emotional engagement.

We all found the characters more complex and interesting than those in The Help, which is also about race relations in the South, though at a later date. Even Pappy, the most stereotyped character, has moments demonstrating his humanity. I found Henry the most interesting. He could have been presented as a classic overbearing husband, but what would seem like tyrannical behaviour today seems normal within the context of the times, and the chapters in his voice show not only his care and concern for his family but also his steadfast and practical nature. Each chapter is devoted to a single voice, alternating between Laura, Henry, Florence, Hap, Jamie, and Ronsel.

The characters play out the conflict between personal morals and society's mores. Those characters who try to transcend the overt and accepted racism of the rural South, still find themselves reacting in ways dictated by the local culture. Laura's great moment of growth and change comes when she recognises this dynamic. This same conflict is played out in other ways, such as the way society dictates family relationships. The story explores who within a marriage makes decisions and how children should behave towards their elderly parents, as Florence and Hap trade decision-making control back and forth, and Henry negotiates the conflicting demands of Laura, Pappy and his own heart.

Jordan handles the emotional connections between the characters particularly well. I was fascinated by how the relationship between Henry and Jamie plays out and the one between Jamie and Pappy, what they could forgive in each other and what they could not. My book club also talked a bit about the difference between an extramarital affair and an affair of the heart. We cannot, of course, control to whom we are attracted, though we can control how we behave with that person. The interesting question is how much is too much. The challenge is finding the line where innocent flirting or fantasizing crosses over into betrayal. We agreed that the great strength of the book lay in its depiction of the way violence is legitimised by the group environment, and the way a person's character is formed within the framework of his or her society, either dominated by it or reacting to it.

Memorial Day, honoring the military men and women who have died in service to their country, seems an appropriate time to talk about this book, third in Perez-Réverte’s Captain Alatriste series.

The story is narrated by íñigo Balboa, fourteen now, a young guttersnipe rescued by Alatriste in the first book. íñigo serves as Alatriste’s mochilero, an aide or soldier’s page, foraging for food and materiel, delivering water and ammunition to the soldiers. They are in Flanders where Alatriste’s unit has been sent to assist with the siege of Breda. The Spanish Army is trying to put down the rebellious provinces where "the conflict had become a kind of long and tedious chess game." The two sides in this long-running war are delineated more by religion than country, with Catholic Spanish and Italian troops versus Protestant Dutch and English.

íñigo is a good choice for a narrator. Young enough to feel the thrill of battle, his eyes have been opened by his twelve months in Flanders. He describes the mud and the rain, the patched clothes and worn-out boots. Because Perez-Réverte is one of my favorite authors, I was not fooled by the cover promising a swash-buckling adventure; I knew that the story would be more subtle and the characters more complex than that. There are adventures and battle scenes, but we see them through íñigo’s eyes, dazzled as he is initially by the romance, but gradually learning the stoic pragmatism and commitment to honor embodied by Captain Alatriste.

íñigo tells of how the army has not been paid and is near starving, given the way the surrounding countryside has been decimated by the long war. They actually have to mutiny in order to receive some pay, but as with every other activity in Spanish society, there are rules and protocols such that even a mutiny can be conducted and settled in an honorable way. In Alatriste’s interactions with his cadre of close companions, the officers he serves under, and the other soldiers we learn more about this fascinating man who says little and keeps to himself.

In the long stretches between actions, íñigo is learning from the men around him and intersperses his account with tidbits of history and descriptions of paragons of honor. These sidebars slow the story a little, but I appreciated the context they provide.

In the battle scenes, Perez-Réverte gives us a realistic description of warfare Seventeenth Century-style in all its brutality. Armed with pikes and harquebusiers, swords and daggers, this is face-to-face bloodshed, not pushing a button on a computer to launch a drone against a far-away enemy. Confused and horrified as he is by the chaos and bloodshed, íñigo still feels the pride and madness of the fight. Standing over the first man he has killed, all that he has experienced coalesces and he learns what it means to be a man.

I used to work with a man some fifteen years senior to me. When the U.S. launched the first Gulf War, he told me that he wished he were young enough to go. He’d fought in Vietnam, so he had no illusions about warfare, but was still caught up in the thrill of battle. I asked him how he’d feel if his then twelve-year-old son were a few years older and serving in the military. He didn’t have an answer. And it is not an easy question. What I do know is that whether I agree with all of my country’s wars or not, I respect those who fight in them and honor their courage and their sacrifice.

A couple of weeks ago, in discussing The Help, I said that the relationship between domestic help and their employers was more complicated than Stockton's book indicated. For a more nuanced view, I went back to this Anne Tyler novel from 1975. While the relationship between the Pecks and their long-time maid Sulie is a very small part of the story, it is a crucial one and Tyler nails it. In just a couple of scenes she captures the conflicting emotions that drive their behavior towards each other. It is a privilege to read this woman's writing.

As the story opens, Justine and her grandfather, Daniel, are on a train to New York, tracking down another lead on the whereabouts of Daniel's brother, Caleb, who walked out of the house one day in 1912 and never returned. It's human nature to want to be part of a group, whether a gang, a neighborhood, a country. For the Pecks, it's the family that defines them. They circle the wagons and don't allow anyone in. Even spouses are eventually squeezed out. And the family ties are so strong that almost no one leaves. Only Caleb. And in this generation: Duncan, Justine's restless cousin and husband, with her floating in his wake as he moves from town to town.

Now Daniel—who never planned to live anywhere but Roland Park, in the large house right next to his father's house, where his spinster sisters now lives—has come to stay with Justine and Duncan while he and Justine search for Caleb.

Justine was always a good girl, obedient and agreeable, conforming to the expectations of the people around her, whether by wearing the hat and gloves that her aunts deem necessary for venturing out of the house, or moving from town to town when Duncan decides to up stakes and try someplace new. Marrying Duncan turns out to be one of her only two reckless moments—the other is learning to tell fortunes—but, as her baffled aunts agree, at least Duncan is a Peck. Like Caleb, Duncan would probably never have bothered to contact the family again once he left, but he has Justine to do that, and he loves her enough to go along to the rare family occasions—with only a little complaining.

Tyler is known for her eccentric characters, but having lived in Roland Park, I have to say that these are all people I recognise. And, knowing them, I am grateful for Tyler's gentle and compassionate hand in assembling their portraits. The older Pecks, secure in their superiority to the rest of the world, are more thoughtless than arrogant. They live in the bubble of the past, carrying on traditions from a previous century, shaking their heads at the way the world seems to be changing.

Roland Park resisted change for a long time. Even in the 1970s when this book was written, there were many families like the Pecks. I too suffered having a hat and little white gloves forced on me. People stayed where they grew up. I remember riding the back roads of Roland Park, maybe fifteen years ago, with my mother and sister as they recited for each house who lived there, what school they went to, who their parents were, what school the parents went to—and in Roland Park that means what prep school. But it is beginning to change. For some people change feels more like loss, so like the Pecks they try to preserve the world that they know. There are many ways to deal with loss, whether it comes in slow increments or with the quiet, almost unnoticed shutting of a door.

While there were things I didn’t like about this book, particularly at the beginning, I have to join the chorus of praise for it. This is one of the most deeply moving books I’ve ever read and it has stayed with me long after I closed the cover.

Ora and her damaged friend, Avram, are walking the length of the country. She’d meant to go with her son, Ofer, but he’s volunteered to continue his military service for one more month so he can participate in a big operation. In her fear for him, Ofer resorts to magical thinking: if she’s not home to be notified, then he cannot be harmed. During the walk, she reconstructs Ofer’s life for Avram who has never met him and knows nothing about him. Ora’s husband, Ilan, has left her and to make matters worse their older son, Adam, has chosen to go with him.

Some people in one of my online reading groups so detest prologues that they refuse to read a book with a prologue. I can see their point, as I’ve mentioned before here and here. This novel almost pushed me into the never-read-a-book-with-a-prologue camp. 47 pages long, the prologue took me over a month to read because I kept putting the book down in frustration. Normal punctuation is missing, as are dialogue tags (he said, she said), sending me backtracking to try to figure out who is speaking. Most frustrating, though, is the lack of clarity about the characters, the situation, and the world they live in.

Three teenagers—Ora, Avram, and Ilan—are alone in a hospital during a war. I admit that I misunderstood when and where we were through almost the whole prologue. The characters seemed flat, almost caricatures, and their speech and interactions surreal. The only thing that kept me going was Deborah's strong recommendation. Once the story finally began—a straight-forward, realistic story set in the present-day with dialogue tags and punctuation—it did capture and hold my interest.

This is a book about connection: between mother and son, husband and wife, brothers, friends. It is also about the connection between people and their land, the physical land itself and their country. The writing really brought home to me what it feels like to live in a country as tenuous as Israel. Avram says, ” ‘I don’t think the Americans or the French have to believe so hard all the time just to make America exist. Or France.'” But of all the connections, it is the one to the child that goes deepest. Ora tries to convey to Avram the entirety of Ofer’s life, which of course includes her life and Ilan’s and Adam’s and what they all mean to each other, in the process drawing Avram into the family.

Although I enjoyed the descriptions of the landscape, the mountains and rocks and flowers, I suffered through the wrenching emotions. This is not an easy book to read. I found myself shrinking from picking it up, not sure I had the emotional stamina for another bout. But Grossman varies the pace well, with the many jumps in time expertly handled. From a writer's point of view, I recommend this book as a textbook on how to employ flashbacks. From a reader's point of view, I cannot recommend the book highly enough as an experience that will leave you with a deeper understanding of what it means to live in this world.

I respect the experience Grossman brings to this book. Much of the writing here is profoundly moving, conveying the emotional journey that is so much harder than any physical journey. I especially appreciate the way he captures the special relationship Israelis have with their land, so much more immediate, intense and conflicted than other citizens have with their own countries. But in the end, it is the parent’s story. I know these fears and the bargains you make with the future, the self-doubt and guilt, the adoration and the letting go. No other fiction I’ve read comes close to capturing as this book does what it means to be a parent.

I really didn’t want to read this bestseller. I had no desire to revisit the segregated South of the early 1960s, when pretty much the only job available to a woman of color was as a domestic servant. However, when my book club chose it, I gave it a try and found it to be a good read. The book flows well, moving along at a good pace. As one member of my book club said, I had no trouble turning the pages. Also, I was relieved that the book has none of the tacky slapstick I’ve seen in trailers for the film.

Returning to her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi after college without the “Mrs” degree her mother expected her to earn, Skeeter wants to be a journalist. She lands a job on the local paper writing a weekly cleaning advice column, in spite of her never having cleaned anything herself. She can’t ask the loving servant who brought her up, because Constantine has mysteriously up and quit while Skeeter was away at college, so she turns to Aibileen, her friend Elizabeth’s maid, for the requisite information. Observing the way Elizabeth and Skeeter’s other childhood friend, Hilly, treat their help, Skeeter hits on the idea of interviewing domestics to get their point of view. What she doesn’t understand is just how dangerous such confidences can be for her and for any servant daring enough to speak with her.

The story is told in chapters that alternate between Skeeter, Aibileen and Aibileen’s friend and fellow servant, Minnie, a feisty woman whose big mouth has lost her many jobs. The author differentiates the three voices well, but I appreciated each having her own chapter. A framework for these personal stories is provided by the nascent civil rights movement, which is presented (accurately, I think) as rumors from the outside world.

Recently one of my own childhood friends mentioned how lucky we were to have the love and guidance of these extra parental figures. She’s right, but of course the relationship was vastly more complicated. Even as a child I wondered who cared for our maid’s children while she fixed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for us. At the same time I understood that, as my mother pointed out, we were providing jobs and financial sustenance for women who had few other options.

To her credit, Stockett uses Skeeter’s research to open up the “Mammy” myth from Gone with the Wind: the belief that servants are part of the family, loving and beloved. For instance, Aibileen talks about how when the children grow up enough to learn their parents’ prejudices, she moves on to work for another family with younger children.

However, I don’t think Stockett goes far enough. The good characters are very good, and the bad characters are awful. More inner conflict for them would make the story more realistic–not, I hasten to add, that there weren’t people who behaved as badly as the villains here, but in my experience there’s a least some redeeming feature. Also, having been a servant myself, though without the burden of racial prejudice, I would expect that love for the employer’s children would not be unmixed with other emotions. Similarly, friendship of a sort can certainly exist between employer and domestic, but when my mother declared that she and her maid were best friends, I could only shake my head at her naïveté.

These relationships are complicated. And I think Stockett could have captured more of that complexity instead of falling back on Pollyannas and happy endings. While I congratulate her for tackling the issue at all and for working so hard to capture voices from both sides, I would much rather have read a story written by a woman of color who had worked as a domestic servant and who could therefore have created more genuine characters.