With the power out all week thanks to Hurricane Irene, I've had many nights that were too dark recently. This 17th novel in the Kate Shugak series starts when a pickup truck is discovered on a rarely traveled road in Alaska with a suicide note taped to the steering wheel. It could have been there an hour or over a month, so a search is organized for the missing driver. Kate, a private investigator in the small town of Niniltna, is drafted by the short-handed police force to conduct the search, but she has barely started when she is interrupted by a ferocious crashing in the woods headed straight for her.

The truck appears to belong to a roustabout from the Suulutaq Mine. Located in the middle of the Iqaluk Wildlife Refuge, 50 miles from Niniltna, the mine is the process of being surveyed. It promises to be the second-largest gold mine in the world, so of course major interests are playing out some heavy political maneuvers, including several corporations and the Niniltna Native Association.

This is the first of Stabenow's books that I've read. Starting with #17 in a series is not such a great idea. I didn't have any trouble following the plot. At first I was a bit overwhelmed with the number of characters whom I should have already known but Stabenow does a good job of dropping in enough information so that I was able to keep everyone straight. And all the characters receive the attention they deserve. What a great cast!

The plot has lots of twists and turns and concludes satisfactorily. But what I really liked was everything around the plot: the smell of freshly caught salmon roasting over open coals, the often testy relationships and shifting alliances within the Niniltna Native Association, the response of locals to the marketing opportunities that come with the mine, the communal festivities at Old Sam's annual moose roast.

One area that particularly struck me, on this Labor Day, involves the working conditions for the employees at the mine. Workers are confined to the mine for two weeks at a time before they are flown to town for a break because it is too expensive to move them in and out weekly. Also, every payday a few more workers disappear, moving on in search of better work. The plan is to go to month-long shifts once the mine goes into operation, and that only after a battle with a head office that wanted eight-week shifts. Remembering how difficult many workers have it makes me grateful for what I have.

Although I found this memoir by the famous anthropologist hard going at first, I have to say that the book rewards persistence. At first the book's structure seemed based on free association. While loosely chronological, Eiseley skips around in time, jumping decades forward or back to recount a meeting with some colorful character. He admits that this hopping about makes the book difficult for the reader to follow, but obviously it was up to me to adapt or stop reading. Eventually I began to recognise how carefully he'd constructed each chapter and the way his tales spiral back with enhanced meaning.

The other aspect that hindered my reading is the tone. Although only in his late 60s, Eiseley refers to himself as old and in fact did pass away two years after this book was published. Here he is summing up his life as he prepares to leave it, with the thought of death and the insignificance of life permeating every reminiscence. He writes of returning to a childhood place where he had carved his name in the sandstone “deep against the encroaching years” only to find that the stone has been worn smooth. Sometimes he comes across as a cranky, dissatisfied old man, railing against the students of the 1960s, for example, or complaining about his insomnia. Incidents that another writer might present in a self-deprecating or even amusing tone are offered as gloomy evidence that there is no achievement that lasts; we live only to die. Yet as the book goes on, he finds the value of one's time on earth, describing the wonders of this life, the dogs who accompany us, the work that inspires us. He says, “all we are quickly vanishes. But still not quite. That is the wonder of words. They drift on and on beyond imagining.”

Eiseley certainly had a hard early life, with a deaf and seemingly unhinged mother and an elderly, ineffectual father who begged him to protect and make allowances for his mother. After his father's death, Eiseley enters a long period of illness and poverty, coincidentally during the worst of the Depression. I enjoyed his descriptions of how to hop trains, his chance acquaintances, hostile brakemen and the body's betrayal. His account of these years is a lesson in how easy it is to fall into poverty and how hard to climb out. He calls this period a prison “in that I could not get outside the ring, the ring of poverty. Like a wolf on an invisible chain I padded endlessly around and around the shut doors of knowledge.”

Only timely help from his uncle enables him to go to college and then graduate school. He writes brilliantly of the professor he studied under, Frank Speck, a man who learned Mohegan from his Indian foster mother and was more comfortable in the woods or pine barrens than in a classroom. Speck tells him of a story by Algernon Blackwood of a man “whose soul was stolen by the past”, a fitting image for these two men, changelings in a way.

I was fascinated by Eiseley's fluid sense of time, even though it made the text a bit confusing. He talks about his sense of the past and future existing simultaneously. He says that being on the road, “People were always appearing from some other century, entering and exiting, as it were, at will. You never knew whether your companions were from the past or the future.” He speaks of the intersection of the two, finding objects “hidden in arroyos” that had been remade by Indians from “the discards of white civilization”, such as iron arrowheads ground from hoes or scrapers from fragments of glass. “Here under the timeless High Plains sunlight, the primitives had tried to reshape the new materials of another age than their own into forms they could comprehend.”

As an anthropologist, he notes physical characteristics of people he meets, such as the 6'5” sailor with fingernails like claws. He ponders human differences and “all that difficult entangled thread that produces successive generations.” This meeting provides another interesting moment, as the man invites Eiseley to sign on with his ship. Eiseley is tempted to abandon graduate school and take to the sea and the freewheeling life he once knew riding the rails and working odd jobs.

Thus does our personal past, not just the world's past, spiral around and return to us. Tripping over my past self as I have been these last few weeks, losing myself on streets I've known all my life, I agree and finally come around to praising this book as the intensely moving experience it has been for me.

Although he started out as a cowboy and still occasionally visits the village of Pine, 30-year-old Milt Dale prefers the solitary life of a hunter. Roaming the White Mountains of Arizona accompanied only by his semi-tame cougar, Dale’s woodsmanship is sufficient to supply him with everything he needs. One day, taking refuge from a storm in an abandoned hut, he accidentally overhears Snake Anson and his gang meeting with a local landowner. Beasley hires Anson to kidnap his rival Al Auchincloss’s young niece who is headed west to help her dying uncle run the ranch. Beasley figures that if she disappears his way will be clear to take over Auchincloss’s ranch. After trying unsuccessfully to warn Auchincloss, Dale surprises himself by deciding to pre-empt Anson by catching Helen Raynor before she boards the stagecoach at Magdalena. “He who had little to do with the strife of men, and nothing to do with anger, felt his blood grow hot at the cowardly trap laid for an innocent girl.”

Laugh if you want, but I love a good western. In a recent review in the London Review of Books Joshua Cohen writes that “genre literature was until recently the lowest of the low” and contrasts it with the use of metaphysics in literature. He describes how “they represent two opposing drives: the desire to be taken seriously and the desire to be popular,” yet have interacted and influenced each other. The qualities that make a good western, or any other genre book, are the same ones that—for me—make a good book: a flawed hero with a strong moral sense, complex characters with whom to interact, an evocative setting, a hefty and intricate plot, and a satisfying ending that pulls it all together without being predictable or sentimental.

The Man of the Forest succeeds on all counts. Gale’s decision to intervene calls into question the life he’s chosen, and he has to re-evaluate his decision to ignore any responsibility to be a contributing member of society and remain aloof from “civilisation”. As they try to adapt to life in the west, Helen and her sister go through changes that set them apart from the usual fainting-maiden/hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold stereotypes. Characters such as the four Mormon brothers who are Gale’s friends and other cowboys experience equally unexpected changes. Even Anson and Beasley surprised me with their depth.

And of course the setting is magnificent and eloquently described. “He crossed the wide, grassy plain and struck another gradual descent where aspens and pines crowded a shallow ravine and warm, sun-lighted glades bordered along a sparkling brook. Here he heard a turkey gobble, and that was a signal for him to change his course and make a crouching, silent detour around a clump of aspens.” Grey describes the wild turkeys running like ostriches which, having seen a few, seems like a perfect description to me.

This is a larger story than Gale’s inner conflict or the danger to Helen and Auchincloss. It’s the story that the television series Deadwood explores so brilliantly: how an isolated group of people agrees on social norms and develops structures, including law enforcement, to support them. The book wears its significance lightly. It’s simply a good read.

This is the third book of poetry from the Toronto-based Sinclair, though the first one I've read. Or rather, immersed myself in, since I've read and reread it, set the book aside for a few months, and read it again. Poets are often advised to go deeper, to make space for more profound meaning to emerge. Sinclair's poems show me how far short of that goal I've fallen. They disturb and entrance me. They make me look at the things of this world in a new way.

In talking about the difference between design and art, Milton Glaser says “. . . the only purpose of art is that it is the most powerful instrument for survival—art is so persistent in all our cultures because it is a means of the culture to survive. And the reason for that, I believe, is that art, at its fullest capacity, makes us attentive.. . . if you look at a work of art, you can re-engage reality once again, and you see the distinction between what you thought things were and what they actually are. Because of that, it is a mechanism for the species to survive.”

Sinclair's poems are truly art, then. She makes her unusual images work, confounding my expectations and delighting my soul. In “The Garden”, for instance, she says:

As it flowers, the garden

sinks, a ship being pulled slowly

under the earth. The sail rises

as it goes down.

I stop to puzzle over this image, appreciating the rooted hull sinking ever deeper, while banks of flowers rise as though hoisted by invisible hands. I think about Timothy Findley writing Not Wanted on the Voyage, his engrossing novel from Mrs. Noah's point of view, in the old barn on his farm, an ancient structure that creaked and groaned in the wind like an ark upon the ocean.

I cannot imagine where Sinclair is going with her image, though, wondering what on earth ships and gardens have to do with each other. She goes on to the flower and how the flower holds the “Sign of its own disappearance” yet draws the light to it, making me think of Dylan Thomas's green fuse. Then we are back to the garden and the light and the “density below”. I don't want to ruin the ending, so will only say that Sinclair ties the poem together in a way that conveyed, to me at least, a truth completely new and yet so deeply familiar that it gave me chills even on a steamy August night.

And so with the rest of the poems in this startling collection. She takes the ordinary things of daily life, such as workmen headed into a railway tunnel, an abandoned mine, or people waiting for a bus in the snow, and finds a larger meaning. She rejoices in beauty without losing sight of its impermanence. In “Awe” she says: “Only in this life does beauty/pursue us, pounce on us” before moving in the second half of the poem to “these are savage times”. Her strong, active verbs and rough judgment brace and balance the lyricism of her images.

I am humbled and exhilerated at the same time. These poems make me pay attention and see something different, something deeper. Wonderful.

In this sequel to Gone, Baby, Gone Lehane brings back Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. That brilliant and disturbing book centered on their search for the missing four-year-old Amanda. Now, twelve years later Patrick and Angie are the parents of their own little girl, Gabriella. Patrick is struggling to make a living as a private detective while Angie finishes her master's degree, but the tough economy has him reluctantly hoping to turn piece-work for a big firm into a permanent job. Unfortunately, as he's told by his contact there, he'll have to lose his attitude first. Then Bea McCready, Amanda's aunt, turns up and demands that Patrick find Amanda, now 16 and once again missing.

Sequels are risky business. You have the advantage of starting with characters who are likely to be familiar to the reader, but then you have the difficult task of providing enough characterisation and backstory so new readers won't feel left out while not boring your loyal longtime readers. Lehane's decision to let so much time pass between the two books gives him a way out of that dilemma: while still recognisably the same, the characters have aged and changed. One reason why sequels, especially in films, so often don't measure up to the original is that authors rely on the formula that worked for them the first time. Lehane never falls into that trap. He challenges himself with every book to become a better writer, always trying something new, such as with the psychological thriller Shutter Island and the historical novel The Given Day. This makes it all the more impressive that he has been able to return to these characters so successfully, coming to them almost as though they are entirely new to him.

I've been a fan of Lehane's writing right from the start. His books are compulsively readable. He has said himself that the mystery is least important part of his books. He sets out to tell a story. It may be a story about gentrification or ethics or what a failing economy does to ordinary people, but whatever it may be, he builds in serious thought and complexity along with a generous dose of smart humor. The mystery is there to serve the story.

We readers bring our own concerns to a book. For me, this week, revisiting a place I first saw over twenty years ago, I couldn't shake that double exposure feeling, the sense that I was following the shadow of my younger self, remembering how I perceived things then and what this place meant to me. So I was particularly attuned to the changes in Patrick and Angie: his recognition that age has slowed him down and made him less willing to put up with the b.s.; her declaration that nothing, not even the questions of right and wrong that drove her in the past, matters more than protecting Gabriella.

I was curious, too, to see who Amanda has become and what happened to Patrick and Angie's relationship after Gone, Baby, Gone. It's hard to let go of characters sometimes, hard for the writer, hard for the reader. Plus it's always fascinating to look at how people change over time and how they remain the same. I looked forward to reading this book, excited as soon as I heard about it, and I have to say that it is even better than I expected. Lehane never disappoints.

I loved this book. It took me forever to read because every time I picked it up, I went back and reread the previous chapters for the pure joy of the prose.

In Precious Bane Prue Sarn tells the story of what happened after the death of her father of apoplexy or stroke following an argument with her brother Gideon. Gideon takes over running the farm, determined to force it to yield the wealth that he believes he requires in order to marry the woman his loves and lead the life he is determined to lead. A good man and a hard worker, he is blind to everything but his goal and pushes Prue and their mother to take on additional work to help reach it. Prue is more than willing. Born with a harelip, which makes some of the villagers mutter that she is a witch, Prue holds fast to Gideon’s promise that he will pay for her disfigurement to be corrected. Only when she is as beautiful as a fairy, Prue believes, will she be able to attract a husband and have a family of her own, like other girls.

First published in 1926, this is a novel about life in a village in the Ellesmere district of Shropshire. It captures the sumptuous beauty of rural life in the pre-industrial past but also the superstition, brutality and terror, thus providing a realistic picture of what is often sentimentalised as Merrie England. Isolated on their farm next to Sarn Mere, Prue works in the fields alongside her brother and trades plowing for writing lessons from a neighbor, Beguildy, who calls himself a wizard and refuses to go to church—such a perfect name for a wizard! It is his daughter Jancis whom Gideon loves and plans to marry when he is rich enough to buy her a big house in town and take her to the Hunt Ball.

I love the strong descriptions that evoke the countryside’s splendour in summer and terrible emptiness in winter. Most of all, I love the way the author weaves them into the story. It is all too easy to drop chunks of description into the action, but Webb integrates action into the description and uses it to reinforce and illustrate the story. In the first chapter, Prue says, “When I look out of my window . . . I call to mind the thick, blotting woods of Sarn, and the crying of the mere when the ice was on it, and the way the water would come into the cupboard under the stairs when it rose at the time of the snow melting. There was but little sky to see there, saving that which was reflected in the mere; but the sky that is in the mere is not the proper heavens. You see it in a glass darkly, and the long shadows of rushes go thin and sharp across the sliding stars, and even the sun and moon might be put out down there, for, times, the moon would get lost in lily leaves, and, times, a heron might stand before the sun.”

I love that image of the heron standing before the sun. I want to quote the whole book. Every passage, whether full of action or ruminative, is so deeply felt. Now that I’ve finished, I can also marvel at the structure underpinning the story, something I barely registered while immersed in Prue’s world. I think I need to read the book a few more times to tease out the threads that tie the story together, the images and ideas that Webb presents with careful pacing that make the ending so satisfying. I love when an object or an image changes in the course of a story, echoing the protagonist’s journey. Paul Scott was a master at this. Here, for example, Webb gives us Sarn Mere in the troubling opening above and as the father’s funeral procession winds past: “. . . the only light there was came from the waning clouded moon and from the torches. But you could see, in the dark water, something stirring, and gleams and flashes, and when the moon came clear we had our shapes, like the shadows of fish gliding in the deep.” Later she talks joyously of the mere in summer, ringed about by oaks, larches and other trees, then a ring of rushes, and an inner ring of lilies “lying there as if Jesus, walking upon the water, had laid them down with His cool hands.” She speaks of the different types of dragonflies to be found at the mere and describes their struggle out of the old skin, staying still just at the end as if wondering if they could do it, before making one last heave and bursting free.

There is much about the fields, the way the corn seems to shine during August nights, and the woods and wildflowers. I’ve gotten distracted by the descriptions but there is plenty of action as well. The title is an oxymoron, of course, since a bane is something that causes ruination or death so one would rarely consider it precious. Hard not to think of Tolkein, writing at the same time. Prue only uses the term in reference to Gideon, and his bane may be precious in itself, such as the riches he works for, or it may be that gift that makes us reach ever higher and achieve more than we ever dreamed possible.

I'm just going to talk about this one story, though I am working my way through a collection of all of O'Connor's stories. One of my book clubs reads short stories, and this was one of the two for July. I hadn't read it since my schooldays, so it was interesting to go back and take another look.

It opens with the grandmother trying to persuade her son, Bailey, to take their vacation in East Tennessee instead of Florida. She summons arguments such as the children's previous visits to Florida and the reports of an escaped criminal called the Misfit who is said to be headed there. Bailey has little to say for himself, but the family does leave for Florida the following day.

First published in 1953, the story presents the family—Bailey, his mother, his wife and two children—as country bumpkins. The grandmother chatters incessantly about this and that, a habit which probably contributes to Bailey's gruff silence. His wife, whose name we never learn, has a face like a cabbage and barely speaks. Two of the children, John Wesley and June Star, don't seem to have ever been disciplined and are rude to everyone, while the third is just a baby. I bristled a bit at this stereotyping of rural southerners as dull and drifting through life, though I recognise the difficulty of shading characters with complexity in a short story. And, as one member of my book club pointed out, further detail about them is unnecessary to the story.

Only the grandmother is fleshed out. She considers herself a lady and makes a point of dressing properly for the drive in a navy suit and matching straw hat, trimmed with violets. After their lunch of barbecued sandwiches at The Tower, she ends up causing an accident, and the family does indeed meet up with the Misfit and his two cohorts. The Misfit is the other character who is presented in full. He is a brutal yet thoughtful man, who even as a child constantly asked about life and why things were the way they were. The grandmother deploys every argument she can think of to prevent the Misfit from killing her silent family. Most of the arguments have to do with religion and trying to persuade the Misfit that he is a good man and a good Christian. It is only at the very end that she sees him as a person, recognises the humanity in him, and responds to it.

One member of my book club thought the story was about which of the two was the better Christian and more deserving of Heaven. Certainly the two are held up as contrasting ways of being in the world, but I thought the story concentrated more on which was the better person. It asks how you recognise a good man or woman. One may be a Christian and one a criminal, but that superficial distinction is not enough. The real differentiator is the questioning. Only such deep thinking can open your mind and lead you to question the authority of those handing down the rules. Only critical thinking can enable you to recognise the humanity of The Other and to see beyond the facile friend/enemy divide that makes states build walls to keep The Other out, whether that Other is a Mexican immigrant, a Palestinian laborer, or a convict.

But those who run our society don't want that. They want obedient drones who think what they are told to think. The title comes up in a discussion the grandmother has with the proprietor of The Tower about how much better things were in the old days. Nostalgia is easily manipulated, as our politicians have shown us by getting us to believe in some mythical past when everything was better. I've often wondered if the American ideal of liberty and democracy ever really existed, even limited to a select group as it was in the past. I wonder if people in the agrarian past were more likely to think critically and question what they were told, a skill that was lost when Ford's assembly lines and associated control by the clock took over. Coincidentally, I'm reading a novel set in a small English village prior to the Industrial Revolution. I'll write about that next week.

Of course the danger is that such a person, a person who actually thinks and questions, might choose to ignore the rule of law and become a criminal, a murderer, a Misfit. That is the ambiguity that we are left with, as we try to sort out what makes a good man.

Detective Superintendent Grace is called out to the brutal slaying of the wife of a successful entrepreneur. The two were a golden couple, wealthy, golf club committee member, Rotarian. The prime suspect is, of course, the husband, Brian Bishop. Evidence against him mounts. At the same time, Grace is distracted by a reported sighting of his wife, who has been missing for nine years, and the resulting difficulties with his new girlfriend, Cleo.

If you like thrillers, you'll enjoy this book. The pacing is excellent, and there are many twists and turns. Unfortunately, I'm not fond of thrillers, so shame on me for not looking more carefully when selecting this book. I also don't like horror stories, so being in the heads of the women being attacked did not add to the story for me.

The narrative moves around placing us in several different heads. Our attention is divided between Grace, the murderer, the husband (who may or may not be the same person), the various victims, and a down-and-out drug dealer named Skunk. Maybe my brain just isn't agile enough anymore, but I found the constant diversion of attention distracting. It may be personal preference again, since I like to discover clues along with the detective.

However, local color of Brighton and Hove is good, and it is interesting to see the author explore the psychology of various characters. He does a good job with many of them—Grace's newly separated partner Glenn Branson, Grace himself—but Grace's borderline alcoholic and sex-obssessed girlfriend, Cleo, didn't ring true to me.

Writers can always break the rules if they have a good reason. In describing a place, writers are advised to choose one or two details that reinforce what you're trying to achieve with the scene. Yet, in describing Brian Bishop's arrest, James gives us everything: Bishop's objections to having his Blackberry and reading glasses taken away, how he felt about removing each item of clothing, exhaustive detail about the cell's appearance down to the material making up the washbasin. What the author achieves with this is to bring us fully into the baffled unreality of a person arrested and placed in a cell for the first time. It was interesting to explore how it would feel to be arrested, and I can see why the author wanted to follow Brian into that experience.

Brilliant, but not particularly important to the story, and of course gives a lot away, unless perhaps the man has multiple personality disorder. This kind of clue, added to the insight from the other characters' minds, meant that I saw the end coming way too soon, though I did keep listening to see how we got there. The themes of obsession and revenge are fertile ones. The author could have dug a bit deeper here, but perhaps I am asking for too much from a thriller. Maybe a thriller just needs to be a roller coaster ride, in which case this book succeeds just fine.

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.