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I seem to have been jumping around in my reading: France, Guernsey, Quebec, England, Maryland, Iran. With this book, I return to France, specifically to the southwestern rural uplands with their limestone outcroppings, sheep pastures, and vineyards. Merwin’s poetry is among the best that I’ve read, so I was curious to see how he would handle these three stories. The answer is: beautifully.

“Foie Gras” circles around the tale of Fatty the Count and his love of that delicacy. Merwin paints a rich portrait of the people and customs of the area. Rumors, relationships, and robbery blend together to create a memorable cast of characters. I was reminded of Flaubert and—more recently—Nemerovski in their joyfully affectionate look at the absurdity of their countrymen and women.

“Shepherds” uses the narrator’s work in restoring a vegetable garden and his interactions with his neighbors to illustrate the region’s change in the 1960s to factory farming. The local shepherds are persuaded, bullied, and coerced into replacing their stone barns with larger corrugated metal barns where the sheep could be kept all the time and given commercial feed instead of being allowed to graze for free in the pastureland. Corruption and graft in the local government—but I’m getting carried away. In fact, the tone is more nostalgic than outraged. This gentle story brims with evocative descriptions of fields bordered by walnut trees, ancient stone fences with little huts built into them for shepherds, neighbors helping each other out. Well, that’s not entirely right either. For every luminous sunset, there is a clear-eyed description of a neighborhood feud or a house with all its furnishings left to rot while the heirs fight over it. Beautiful and provocative at the same time, the story captures what it is to be human in society and in this beautiful world.

“Blackbird’s Summer” at first seemed to ramble, somewhat in the way that the main character is often on the move, showing a local spring to the priest, delivering wine to his customers, visiting neighbors, helping his daughter and her husband in the hotel. Gradually, however, I came to respect the nuanced image of Blackbird that was being built through all these interactions and reflections. He begins to pick through the contents of the old house, down the road from the hotel: old account books, crocheted bedspreads, wooden kneading troughs. His thoughts of the past are reinforced by talks with his customers, those who are prospering and those whose fortunes are fading. And he begins to wonder who would be willing to carry on his wine business, since his son-in-law is a milk-drinker and his only grandchild still an infant and a girl at that.

Merwin’s language is simply gorgeous. And his insights into these flawed and endearing characters are devastating. Their stories are enlivened by humor and a sense of the past—the Occupation, the 1914 War, even Napoleon cast their shadows over the present. The many tales of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and the concern for the children’s legacy brings out the sense of nostalgia, of an ancient way of life slipping away.

I have learned not to trust books that trumpet their bestseller status on the cover and have pages and pages of glowing endorsements. More often than not, these books disappoint me, perhaps because my expectations have been raised by all the hype. Some are real stinkers: I couldn’t get past the first 50 pages of our last month’s book club pick Lempriere’s Dictionary with its frenetically jumping point of view and lack of any discernable plot. Desai’s book was this month’s book club pick and, while not a stinker, it has serious flaws that would have made me abandon it if I were just reading it for my own pleasure.

Certainly the language is often gorgeous. The lush descriptions of the house and garden in Kalimpong, in the Himalayas, drew me into the story. The details of the lives in the house—the leather-bound National Geographic magazines, the scorpions in the woodpile—were brilliant.

The inhabitants are Sai, her grandfather (a retired judge), and the cook (whose son Biju has emigrated to New York). Sai’s isolation among the artifacts of the past is broken by regular trips to the village, where she is tutored by one of two sisters who have retired to the village, and visits from Gyan, a young man who has been brought on to tutor Sai in mathematics and science.

How Sai came to live with her grandfather nine years earlier is one problematic area: too many threads are left dangling. The judge disowned his daughter when she married, but apparently paid Sai’s school fees after his daughter and her husband were killed. Then when for some unstated reason, the fees are not being paid, the school decides to send Sai to her listed next of kin, her grandfather. Did he stop paying the fees? Why? Why did he pay them in the first place if he had disowned his daughter? It seems as though this section was not thought out completely.

The main problem with the book is structural. Within the first few pages we get the mandatory in media res scene of seemingly-irrational violence erupting into their quiet, inwardly-focused lives: McEwan’s favorite jump-start for a plot. But Desai then abandons her plot for 200 pages of static backstory, slowly filling in the backgrounds for Sai, her dead parents, the judge, the cook, his son, and so on. When she finally picks up the story again—did I say it was 200 boring pages later?—she also picks up the pace and the last section of the book is excellent. Desai’s insights about revolution and identity, about immigration and dreams, family and the loss of the past are woven into the story of Sai’s affair with Gyan and the fate of her family and friends during the Gorkha insurgency.

Usually I dislike too many changes of point of view, but here Desai handles the switch between Kalimong and New York very well, keeping the different settings in separate chapters. The interspersed chapters about Biju’s rather predictable life as an immigrant without a green card are short and add another dimension to the concerns of the people back in Kalimpong. In fact, all of the chapters are short and cut up into even shorter segments.

As it turned out, everyone else in my book club was still mired in those 200 pages, though several said they were enjoying them and not bored at all. I ended up enjoying the book and was glad I finished it. Still, if Desai had only shortened those 200 pages to perhaps 30 pages of backstory and integrated the backstory better, this would have been a truly excellent book.

I haven’t yet seen the film based on this graphic novel, a memoir of growing up in Iran during the turbulent 1980s. The book opens a year after the Islamic Revolution, with the ten-year-old and her classmates being told they must wear a veil at school. It is hard to write about political situations without becoming mired in outraged diatribes, yet Satrapi succeeds brilliantly. What is so effective here is that she stays in the child’s viewpoint. Hence, we see the girls using the required veils as monster masks or tying them together to make a jump rope.

Satrapi maintains that viewpoint as the child becomes a teenager and the family’s freedom gradually becomes more restricted. I was particularly curious about how her adolescent rebellion would play out in the context of the larger cultural revolution, and I was not disappointed. Swinging between patriotic fervor during the war with Iraq and horror at the gold keys “to heaven” given to young boys, the young woman’s reactions to her world struck me as deeply felt and emotionally honest. Satrapi’s art, although crude, does an okay job of conveying the emotional content. Some of the most effective panels are the occasional abstract ones.

The question I’m left with at the end of the day, though, is: does it work? And I have to answer: sort of. Parts of it are quite moving and others give a sense of the mingled ordinariness of daily life and shock of terrible events. Yet, for me, the inherent superficiality of the graphic novel format prevented me from full emotional participation in the story.

Don’t get me wrong—I like graphic novels, and I think it an especially appropriate format for this story from a child’s point of view. However, now I would like to read a story of women in post-revolution Iran that fully engages me with descriptions of place and nuanced characters. I didn’t get that from the oddly popular Reading Lolita in Tehran either. Despite its bizarre best-seller status, I found that book lacking in content. I’d hoped to learn more about the young women, and felt betrayed by finding out that the author had used composite characters. Only the mini-lectures about the books were interesting.

I recommend Persepolis as an excellent start at conveying the reality of life in post-Revolution Iran. If it left me hungry for more, that’s not such a bad thing.

This is a good story. In some ways, it was the perfect reading experience: I was carried away into the world of the story, caught up in the characters’ concerns. With some books (including most mysteries) the adrenaline kicks in and has me racing for the end, but with this book each scene drew me on, gently, ineluctably. There was just enough description to enable me to visualise everything without the descriptive passages overpowering the action. The characters seemed like people I knew, and the point of view moved between them in a natural way that did not disrupt the story. And it wasn’t until I finished the last page that I began to consider the larger implications of what I had read.

Harry Mason tells the story of his grandparents, Edith and Edward Mason, as they return to the U.S. in 1936 after many years of living in England. Edward fancies himself a great businessman, but his factory in Manchester, England, has been declining for many years and he is finally being forced to bring his wife and two sons, Sebastien and Simon (Harry’s father), home to take up residence in the family estate he has inherited from his aunt: some acres and a house which has been left empty and unattended for years and is now filled with mold and fallen plaster.

The Retreat is located on Maryland’s eastern shore, and one of the great joys of this book is seeing how this cosmopolitan, yet unsophisticated family reacts to their first encounter with life in such a remote backwater and how they adjust over the course of time to life among the farmers, white and black, and the inbred owners of neighboring estates. Anyone who has been to the eastern shore will appreciate these descriptions of the life and landscape in the days before the Bay Bridge brought hordes of tourists and retirees.

I initially picked up the book because the opening scenes take place on the Normandie, a pre-World War II luxury liner which has been part of my personal mythology since staying in the Normandie Hotel in Puerto Rico in the 1990s. Yet I quickly became absorbed in the concerns of all the characters as they try to figure out how best to live their lives and accommodate each other. I forgot about the Normandie until I finished the book and found myself wondering about the remnants of the past, what is new and what we carry forward.

A most satisfying read, I highly recommend this book and will be looking for others by this author.

Elizabeth Goudge is one of my favorite authors, though some of her children’s books are a bit too sweet for my taste. Of her adult books, my favorites are The Scent of Water and the Damerosehay books, with their lovely descriptions and gentle wisdom. Of her YA (young adult) books, this one is my favorite, although The Little White Horse runs a close second.

When their father departs for a new posting in India, the four Linnet children are left with their grandmother and her companion, Miss Bolt, two elderly women whose autocratic ways do not go over well with the children. Nan, Robert, Timothy, and Betsy, ranging in ages from twelve to six, are most distressed at being abandoned by their father, their mother having died five years earlier. After a particularly difficult set-to with Grandmama and the Thunderbolt, the children run away, scrambling over the garden wall and trudging toward the setting sun.

Tiring, they spy a pony and cart outside of a pub and hop in. The pony sets off for home, fetching up at a dark house in a mysterious village. Investigating, they find a tall man with an owl on his shoulder, who turns out to be their Uncle Ambrose, a retired schoolteacher-turned-parson who professes to loathe children and all their ways. Yet he allows them to stay with him. Also resident is Ezra, who has pointed ears and cooks delightful meals for the children, despite having been left to walk home from the pub when the children “borrowed” the pony and cart. Adventures ensue, as the children get caught up in the tensions and tragedies of the village and its surroundings.

Part of why I love this story is simply the immersion in another world. Set in 1912, the way of life described in this story has a nostalgic tint, but it is far from the Merrie England stereotype. There’s a bit of The Fatal Englishman as Sebastian Faulks called it: amateur explorers and archeologists wandering off on adventures and getting lost. There’s the darkness that comes from village isolation, set against the power of intelligence, learning and the ability to love. And, of course, everything is lit by the lovely glow of that “long afternoon” of the pre-war years.

Another part is the children themselves. Goudge does children very well. They are neither sarcastic nor smarmy, neither too good nor too bad, simply real children. I can’t imagine how Goudge knows or remembers so well how children think and what they care about, but she does so brilliantly. I also like the way she describes the food at meals with such relish, whether it’s the tiny cakes for tea or the great fry-ups for breakfast. Goudge’s descriptions of places, especially gardens and houses, are quite wonderful. Something about the description of Nan’s little parlor, furnished for her by Ambrose, has stayed with me over the years.

Finally, I like the way the magic bits are handled: lightly, deftly. You can chalk them up to a child’s imagination or, if you like, believe that a cat can concertina into a huge monster and a handful of bees lead you to safety. I love the gentle allusions to legends about bees and fairy folk. This book is charming, not in an empty soap-bubble way like Brideshead’s Sebastian, but in the old sense of casting a spell on the reader, enchanting me again every time I read it.

I enjoyed Penny’s earlier book Still Life which was the first book in this series. What I liked best were the descriptions of the setting, a small village just south of Montreal, and the people who live there, many of whom are artists of one sort or another. In that first book, the villagers’ relationships and jealousies and secrets must be disinterred and disentangled in order to discover why and how their elderly neighbor died while walking through the woods on Thanksgiving morning. I liked the detective, Inspector Gamache, but I found the young agent who comes along on the case, Yvette Nichol overdone and unrealistic. Elements of the ending took me by surprise, always a good thing.

Here, a woman who has recently moved to Three Pines is electrocuted in the middle of a curling match, and Inspector Gamache is called from Montreal to investigate. The dead woman, a self-centered monster who showered her husband, daughter, and lover with verbal abuse, has some mysterious tie with the village. She has named her decorating/self-help company and self-published book “Be Calm” which is also the name of a spitituality center in Three Pines run by a local woman.

While I enjoyed the bits of Canadiana and curling lore, I was a little disappointed by this book. The descriptions are wonderful and the plot suspenseful, but most of the characters are too simplistic, either perfect saints or evil monsters. Unfortunately, agent Yvette Nichol, whose portrayal marred the first book, is back and, despite some additional backstory, still more of a caricature than a person. Gamache himself is a bit too good to be true. Only the young couple who help him, Clara and Peter, and a few of the minor characters are allowed contradictions and complexity.

Penny is an excellent writer, but some aspects of the book are clumsily handled. For example, there are a number of threads left hanging at the end, which I find frustrating, since part of what I like about mysteries is the resolution. Also, we know little of Gamache’s inner life. He is trustworthy, brave, loyal, etc. but needs some inner conflict to come to life. Penny attempts to do that through the use of what I call a “Chinatown”, an off-hand reference early in the story that isn’t fully explained until the end, subconsciously pushing the reader to keep going (see my blog entry on Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro). Here, the references to the Arnot case, something in the past that has deeply affected Gamache, are meant to be just such a Chinatown, but instead of making me want to read on, they irritated me.

In trying to figure out why they didn’t work here, I thought back to Ian Rankin’s Rebus series and some of Laura Lippman’s books where the authors use this technique brilliantly. I think the difference is that Penny’s references are not off-hand. She might as well put them in the middle of a bulls-eye with arrows drawn toward them screaming, “This is important!” whereas Rankin in particular manages to drop his references inconspicuously in the middle of a conversation. The missing explanation seems to have no real importance, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I continue to puzzle over it.

Despite my complaints, I found this a good read. I hope that the series improves as Penny becomes more and more adept at her craft. It would not take much to make this series one of the very best around.

This is another lost book, not because the notebooks were hidden away after the death of the author as with Suite Francaise but because after its publication in 1981, it seems to have sunk into the obscurity that awaits most books. As a writer, I find it rather depressing the way most books are read for a season and then disappear, no longer available from the publisher. I also have my doubts about which books make up the canon, the ones that live on in literature courses, but that’s another discussion.

Although I read a lot and widely, I had never heard of this book until its reissue last year from New York Review. What a treasure! I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a book so much. Each time I picked it up, I started by going back a few chapters for the joy of reading them again before going on.

This is Ebenezer’s first-person narrative of his life on Guernsey, the island he left only once, to go to Jersey to play in a football match. It covers a period of great change in the life of the island, from the early days when everyone knew—and gossiped about—everyone else to modern days when Guernsey has become a tax haven and tourist destination. Ebenezer quarries granite with his father, watches his friends go off to fight in World War I (which ended just as he was about to be called up), suffers under the German Occupation during World War II and what he calls the English Occupation that follows.

What makes the book so great is Ebenezer’s voice. His sentences are calm and straightforward, but often with a wicked dig at the end. “My father was killed in the Boer War. He went off and joined the Irish Brigade and fought for the Boers.” “There was a mystery about Princess Zubeska. She had red hair like Eugene, but it was grey when she came to Guernsey.” I sometimes had to read such lines a couple of times over to be sure. Other times I just had to laugh out loud: “I thought they might make it up the day they went to Sark, since Raymond said Sark was heaven on earth; but it was rough coming back and she was seasick all over him.”

I usually loathe books written in dialect, but here it is handled so well that I loved the way it added to Ebenezer’s distinctive voice. It’s not overwhelming, but comes out sometimes in the syntax: “That’s why I have never left Guernsey, me.” Then, too, there are a few words and phrases in the Guernsey patois, a version of French, but never enough to be intrusive and always easy to understand from the context.

There is something I always find rather sad in a story—fictional or not—of an entire life, something about the early promises unfulfilled, the inevitable compromises with grief, the abilities lost or abandoned in old age. Yet my sadness here was tempered by an appreciation of this acerbic and entertaining personality, whose prejudices are balanced by his capacity for love and great friendship.

Edwards completed this, his only book shortly before his death in 1976. It was the first of a planned trilogy about life on Guernsey, and I can only mourn the unwritten books, as I do the last three books in Nemirovsky’s suite.

Several people recommended this wonderful book to me, for which I’m grateful. As most people know by now, the story behind this book about the German occupation of France during World War II is almost as interesting as the book itself. Nemirovsky, an established writer of Ukrainian origins living in France, wrote the two novellas making up Suite Francaise almost as the events depicted in them were unfolding. They are part of Nemirovsky’s projected five-book series about the war. Ironically, the third book was to be Captivity but Nemirovsky herself was arrested and sent to Auschwitz where she died, followed shortly by her husband. Her daughter preserved the notebooks containing these two novellas but did not read them until the late 1990s.

As a writer, I am mightily impressed with Nemirovsky’s ability to write about what was even then occurring, without the leisure for reflection and analysis. Her grasp of the larger issues stunned me, as did her detailed observations of people’s reactions to events and her recognition of what they said about France as a whole. And I can’t say enough about her evocative language, her use of dialogue, her ability to see into the hearts of so many different sorts of people.

For all I have read about both world wars, this is the first time I’ve read an account of what it was like for ordinary, middle-class folks when the Germans descended on Paris. “Storm in June” follows several families and individuals engulfed by the panic and chaos as they try to flee. Sometimes funny, sometimes sardonic, sometimes sweetly sympathetic, Nemirovsky allows us to experience their uncertainty as they struggle with the practical details of leaving town. Do you take the cat? Linens? Artworks? Where do you get gas for the car? Are the trains still running?

What I found most interesting was how long it took some people to understand the extent and ramifications of what was happening, like the mother who tells her children that as good Christians they should share their cookies and chocolates with other refugees until she realises that she cannot buy more because the stores are empty. I was also fascinated by how the panic affected the social structure and norms, what broke down and what remained.

“Dolce,” the second novella, takes place in a small rural town where some of the refugees have come to rest. Unlike the usual tales of the Resistance and collaborators, these extraordinarily realistic characters struggle to balance their patriotism and pride against the obvious humanity of the German soldiers who occupy the town. Throughout both novellas, Nemirovsky’s characters are minutely observed and insightfully depicted. One reviewer compared her to Flaubert in her realism which I think is true.

And it is the characters who drive her themes of greed and betrayal. The upper middle-class and aristocracy seem concerned only with themselves, like the bank manager who callously abandons two of his elderly employees whom he’d promised to drive out of Paris, simply because his mistress wants the car. At the same time, he demands that they meet him in Tours in two days or lose their jobs, without seeming to recognise that they have no way to get there other than walking. Or the rich aesthete who loads his car with his precious artifacts and, when he runs out of gas, tricks two young lovers in order to steal their gas. Yet Nemirovsky manages to balance the egotistical pettiness of her characters with humane sympathy for their limitations.

Some reviewers have complained that she did not address the issue of anti-semitism and the fate of the Jews, particularly since she herself was Jewish. Similarly, some reviewers complained about McEwan’s Saturday because he didn’t write about the anti-war march itself. However, I believe writers should be allowed to write what they want, what they are compelled to write. Even though I’m often guilty of criticising a book because it doesn’t tell the story I wanted or expected it to, I at least recognise that I’m the one at fault. I highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys having a slice of history come to life, or meeting unforgettable characters, or simply reveling in gorgeous language.

I had been reading some of Wendell Berry’s essays about his Kentucky farm, so was delighted when a friend loaned me this book of short stories. The stories center on Ptolemy Proudfoot, a farmer, a large man, the last of what was once a large clan of Proudfoots in and near the town of Port William. Details of farm life enrich these deceptively simple tales of Tol and his wife, Miss Minnie. Hard work is leavened by the social occasions that Tol loves: visits to town, neighbors dropping by the house, family gatherings, a harvest festival at the school.

The affectionate depictions of Tol’s eccentric neighbors and the unspoken ties that bind them together reminded me of Mohawk especially in the way they assumed a certain responsibility for each other. Just as the owner of the bar and grill in Russo’s book gave Wild Bill a job and watched out for him, just as Dallas’s friends continued to loan him money and tolerate his feckless way with a timeclock, so Tol and his friends watch out for each other.

In the novella from which the book takes its title, Tol is visited by a neighbor known as Nightlife who was prone to spells where he became confused and angry, even dangerous. Occasionally he was sent to the asylum “where they would file him down and reset his teeth.” On this day, Nightlife picks up Tol’s shotgun, says something about how a man might as well shoot himself, and walks off. Tol follows him, reluctant to confront him and be shot himself, but unwilling to just let the man go. Tol is eventually joined by other neighbors, and they follow the man through woods and fields for the entire day and night and into the next day. They didn’t have to. They could have gone home to their wives and their dinners and their neglected fields, but their sense of responsibility for their neighbor wouldn’t let them.

The long walk is enlivened by stories brought to mind by places they pass and people they encounter. Tol also likes to tell stories about his grandfather, as in “Turn Back the Bed” where the men at a church picnic beg him to tell the story of his grandfather, a chamberpot, and a Proudfoot family gathering long ago. The past is present in all of these tales, Tol’s constant awareness of those who worked these fields and lived in these houses lending a depth and perspective to the simplest everyday action.

Tolkien called it “shimmer”, this sense of looking at things and seeing the past like a shadow behind it, and another past beyond that, and another. He deliberately included it in The Hobbit and The Lord of Rings trilogy, with their references to half-remembered legends, ruins whose stories had been lost, great statues left from long-gone civilizations.

In one of his essays, “The Long-Legged House”, published in a collectin with the same name, Berry talks about this awareness of the past in his own life. The essay focuses on a cabin on the river built by Curran Matthews, his grandmother’s brother, and what it has meant to Berry throughout his life, from a teenager’s camp to the place where he took his wife after their wedding to a weekend get-away. Even though there is nothing left of it at the present but the chimney and well, some locust trees, and the little white flowers in the grass, Berry looking at it sees the shades of the past: his great-uncle building it, himself as a young man. He sees the sycamore warbler of the present, echoed by the phoebes that used to build nests under the eaves. He says that “. . . where most American writers—and even most Americans—of my time are displaced persons, I am a placed person.” He goes on to say that it is not so much that we can possess a place but that a place can possess us.

I understand this. It’s the way I feel about the camp in Plymouth. The first time I went there, I felt that I had discovered my own place, the place in the world where I belonged. It took a while for me to understand that instead, I belong to the place, as so many others have in the past and do today.

This is the first Russo book I’ve read and, as promised, it depicts life in small, failing New England mill town with such immediacy and accurancy that anyone who has ever lived in one will recognise the town and its people. By putting other names to these characters, they would become true portraits of people I’ve known: a daughter held in thrall to an over-controlling mother, a feckless man who doesn’t understand why none of his schemes succeeds, an overly honest man who is rejected by his co-workers yet is only too aware of his own failings, a too-smart young man who unnerves those who prefer the comfort of mediocrity in their fellows, a couple who—married to others—do not act on their feelings.

Yet Russo manages to depict these people in all their complexity, avoiding the easy stereotypes. I particularly liked the way he captured the subtle ties and dependencies between these people. There is something deeply human going on here, something that stands against the greed and selfishness that often seem to me to make up the foundation of human nature. Even Neolithic societies, it has been argued (see On Deep History and the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail), were structured as dominance hierarchies where those on top kept subordinates in line by random acts of violence. While this rule of terror seemed to occur only in the settlements (the hunter-gatherers being more egalitarian) it is still disconcerting to think that an amoral greed for power is so deeply engrained in us.

I’ve wandered a bit from the town of Mohawk, New York, but my point is that Russo brings out the curious way we tolerate each other’s failings and sometimes show a rare and remarkable generosity. It is unusual to find, outside of war stories, something that captures the companionships of men, the way they are with each other in times of boredom and times of stress. By placing them in an unremarkable backwater like Mohawk, Russo presents these characters’ ordinary interactions and highlights their moments of transcendent connection.

Some of the places, such as the bar and grill, are characters in themselves. The old hospital, which is in the process of being torn down, plays an important role in the story. Its emergency room was a place to see your neighbors on Saturday nights after the bars closed and victims of bar fights and domestic abuse began to trickle in. It is a fitting symbol for these people, all of whom have been damaged: some physically, such as Dan who is tied to a wheelchair after an auto accident and Wild Bill who has been left mentally deficient after a mysterious incident in his youth; some financially, such as Anne who gives up opportunity after opportunity to care for the parents with whom she cannot connect; and some emotionally, such as Dallas who cannot get past the death of the brother who was his ballast and keel.

The story unfolds naturally out of these characters—none of McEwan’s diaboli ex machina here—and brings their intertwined fates to a stunning climax. Russo does a great job of maintaining suspense by revealing some secrets and withholding others. The pacing here is excellent. There are several different story threads that in equal measure make up the pattern of the book. While this kind of tapestry approach to plotting certainly reinforces the sense of a varied community, I usually prefer novels with a single main narrative and main character, enriched with many subplots and minor characters. Still, I enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.