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.

I don't buy peaches in the grocery store anymore. Either they rot before getting ripe or they have no flavor. I'm lucky to have alternatives: nearby farms and farmers' markets where I can find good peaches.

This memoir opens with the shocking image of Masumoto expecting to have to bring in the bulldozers to rip out his orchard of peach trees. These healthy and productive trees produce Sun Crest peaches, an heirloom strain with amazing flavor but a short shelf life and mild color.

As suppliers constantly tell Masumoto, consumers only care about the color and markets need fruit that can be shipped long distances without spoiling. To meet this demand, nurseries compete to come up with the next flavor-of-the-month strain of fruit. This surprised me. I would expect it of peas or tomatoes or other annuals, but the time investment in fruit trees seems so great that a quick turnover to catch a market boom in the popularity of a particular strain would be impossible. It would be like a writer trying to imitate some new popular book, not realising that by the time her book is written and published, an entirely different kind of book will have captured the public's imagination.

And of course, the suppliers are wrong. At least, I think I'm not the only consumer who cares much more about flavor than color. I'd pretty much stopped eating apples because they were so bland, but now we have lots of heirloom kinds of apples available. Same thing with tomatoes. I would love to try a Sun Crest peach.

Masumoto's descriptions of farm life are lovely: blossoms in the spring, weighing a peach in your hand to determine ripeness, spreading grapes on paper trays to dry in the sun, pruning branches for the best growth. He talks a lot about the relationship between the farm and family, not just his wife and children but his parents and grandparents. He remembers and beautifully describes the way his grandmother, his baachan, walked in from the fields.

His grandparents came to the U.S. from Japan and were following the hard working emigrant path when World War II started and they, like other Japanese-Americans, were sent to detention camps. After they got out, even though they were middle-aged, they decided to save and buy their own land. Masumoto's father stayed to work the farm his parents bought, the land that the author now farms, producing peaches and raisins.

Masumoto has a lovely voice, calm and straightforward, even when describing the indignities of the camps and the way neighbors helped themselves to the belongings left behind. His attitude is both realistic, especially about the difficulties of making a family farm successful, and idealistic. He still believes that there are people out there who will want his peaches and that he can support his family, even as he describes the vagaries of the weather that can wipe out a crop of raisins in a day, and migrant workers whose unavailability can cause a disastrous delay at harvest time. Unsparing of himself, he is quick to own up to his mistakes and naïveté.

In the end, this account is a realistic depiction of life on a family farm. I've worked on a dairy farm, but cultivating trees calls for a very different relationship with time. I agonised with Masumoto over whether trees had grown too old to be productive or what path a threatening storm might take. I rejoiced with him on finding a much-needed antique defuzzer in a shed and in taking twilight walks through the vineyards with his young children. Anyone interested in locavore issues or who just wants to be immersed in a different sort of life for a while will enjoy this book.

I've learned to avoid reading the back cover and inside jacket before I've finished the book because they often give away too much of the story. Sure enough, the back cover of this book has a blurb containing a spoiler, but avoiding it didn't help me since it only took me a few chapters to recognise the classic that this story is based on. Knowing what was going to happen made me put down the book often, in spite of the excellent writing. I just didn't feel that I had the emotional stamina to take the tragedies that I knew were coming.

At one point, having been away from it for several weeks, I thought I could safely label it a did-not-finish. It looked innocent enough lying there on my bedside table, though, and eventually the beautiful prose lured me back into the story and I did finally finish it.

Edgar is the much-wanted son of Gar and Trudy, who breed and train dogs, carrying on the work of Gar's father. The dogs have come to be known simply as Sawtelle dogs and are carefully placed with people who will respect and continue the training instilled by the Sawtelles. Edgar is born deaf but learns to sign with his parents, often with signs he's adapted or made up. His companion is Almondine, a Sawtelle dog who sleeps, plays and eats with Edgar, teaching him as she teaches the puppies how to behave. As he gets older, Edgar's job is to name the new puppies, a job he takes very seriously, perusing the dictionary and matching the name to the personality. Then he begins to help with the training.

It is the training portions that fascinated me, the descriptions of the tasks they put the dogs through, and of the bond that develops between human and canine. Gar's father had an extensive correspondence with another expert who did not believe that dogs could be bred for qualities of character rather than color of coat or shape of ear yet the Sawtelle methods have clearly been successful. Gar carries on his father's meticulous breeding records.

Wroblewski's prose is arrestingly lovely even in its plainness. He says of Edgar's mother: “Working with the dogs, Trudy was at her most charismatic and imperious. Edgar had seen her cross the mow at a dead run, grab the collar of a dog who refused to down, and bring it to the floor, all in a single balletic arc. Even the dog had been impressed: it capered and spun and licked her face as though she had performed a miracle on its behalf.”

He also captures Edgar's mindset at each age, from early childhood into his teens, affected by his isolated life on the farm in northern Wisconsin. Describing the day Edgar and his father discover a stray, Wroblewski says that Edgar stops “near the narrow grove of trees that projected into the south field atop the hill. A granite ledge swelled from the ground there, gray and narrow and barnacled with moss, cresting among the trees and submerging near the road like the hump of a whale breaking the surface of the earth. As his father walked along, Edgar stepped into the wild mustard and Johnson grass and waited to see if the ground might ripple and seal over as the thing passed. Instead, a shadow floated into view at the ledge's far end. Then the shadow became a dog, nose lowered to the mossy back of the leviathan as though scenting an old trail. When the dog reached the crest of the rock, it looked up, forepaw alert, and froze.”

There is much in this book about domestication and the wild, compromise and danger. I'm glad I read on. By the time I reached the end, I was ready for it. And I would not for anything have missed the man Edgar meets on his travels.