The Favorite Daughter by Kaira Rouda

The Favorite Daughter by Kaira Rouda is a book that will twist and turn and move at break neck speed that will have the reader questioning everything they think they know as they go along. What is truth? What are lies? But most of all, what is madness?

“…This ocean view is why we bought this home all those years ago, scraping together every last dime and tapping into David’s trust fund to move into The Cove, the best community in Southern California. We were young parents, and so madly in love. The ocean was romantic, beautiful then. Not deadly and dark and cold.
I feel the rush of heat as my hands clench into fists. Anger and loss, did you ever notice how those emotions mix together? It’s a toxic combination. I swallow. I need to focus on the table, the first step of my coming-out party. All that’s missing from this perfect setting is the fourth wineglass. I have another one, of course. It’s almost symbolic. It was Mary’s spot at the table, Mary’s wineglass that fell to the floor.
Mary who dropped into the sea…”

Jane Harris lives in an enviable community in Southern California, living a very wonderful life with a husband and two daughters. It was the perfect life. One she had worked very hard for. It was complete she thought and completely under control. Until the day her oldest daughter fell to her death in a tragic accident and Jane’s perfect world came apart at the seams.

But now Jane is back and under control and she wants to take back what she believes is hers. Everything she had before Mary died. Control of her life, her children, her husband. It’s been a year but the timing seems perfect to Jane. Mary is going to have a memorial and three days later her second daughter, Betsy will graduate High School and leave for college. But the universe has moved on in the last year while Jane has been in a haze of anti-depressants. Betsy is distant and Jane’s husband Dave is working long hours at the office. And even more so are the notes Jane is receiving, telling her that perhaps Mary’s death was not the accident everyone thinks it is.

“…My daughter’s face is pale, her lips pursed. ‘Mary was alive when I left her, you know that. This is why people hate you. Accusing your own daughter of something horrible, of knowing some sort of secret. I don’t know what you’re up to but I desperately want to be normal again, to feel normal again. It’s hard enough to not have Mary. She was my best friend. If you try to open this all up again, we’ll lose the little bit of respect we have around here. I can’t take it, the stares, the pity. Not again. If you try to open Mary’s case, Dad and I will tell everyone you’re insane, a monster…”

Jane is on a mission. To back what is hers and no one is going to get in her way. Not her husband, not her daughter, not Mary’s biological mother and not her uber rich in-laws. No Jane knows how to run the game and she is in charge. Problem is, who do you believe when everyone around you is lying. When you can’t even believe yourself?

Whatever you may think about this book I guarantee you this much. You will never forget Jane Harris. She is a chameleon of a character. From victim to manipulator to schemer to jilted wife to unloved mother. Is she innocent of capable of great evil? This tale is told in Jane’s words and through her eyes and thoughts, but it doesn’t take the reader long to realize that there is something very, very wrong with Jane. Or is there? Is Jane just playing it up to gain sympathy or an advantage. The way she treats those she says she loves only proves that Jane is not really capable of loving anyone. It is all about her.

This is a good and disturbing read!

Little Darlings by Melanie Golding

Little Darlings by Melanie Golding is a novel that walks that fine line between fantasy and psychological thriller and does it with an ease of an Olympic skater taking to the ice. In parts mind bending and in parts horrifying. You will wonder from time to time what is and isn’t real. When a new mother of twins becomes convinced that someone is trying to take her children and then, that they babies are not her babies; is it an emotional breakdown or something far worse?

“…Through the binoculars, Harper saw the woman collapse into a sitting position on the dried-out silt, her face turned to the sky, still clutching the babies. Perhaps she wouldn’t do it, after all.
A memory surfaced then, of what the old lady had said to her:
‘She’ll have to put them in the water, if she wants her own babies back…Right under the water. Hold ’em down.’
The woman wasn’t sitting at the water’s edge anymore; she was knee-deep, and wading further in…”

Lauren Tranter is exhausted, after a difficult birth and after care, her twins are finally here. Two beautiful newborn boys. Morgan and Riley. So when she is found screaming and locked into her hospital room bathroom, the staff put it down to medication and lack of rest. The emergency call into the police is dismissed as hysterics. The hospital staff and the security video back up the diagnosis that Lauren had a episode but that she and her twins are safe. That nothing had happened. But Lauren knows what she saw and she knows the woman was real. The woman who smelled and looked homeless, the woman with twins of her own. The woman who wanted to exchange her children for Lauren’s boys.

“…Choose one,’ said the woman, ‘choose one or I’ll take them both. I’ll take yours and you can have mine. You’ll never know the difference. I can make sure they look just the same. One’s fair. Two is justice done…”

It’s a slow morning at the Police Headquarters when Jo Harper goes over the calls from the night before. The child abduction at the hospital seems off. Later turning out to be a new mother having what the hospital personal are calling, an episode. Still, Jo is not sure about it and decides to make a trip to the hospital to be sure. The young mother is scared but on enough pain killers that it could have been a hallucination. Jo decides to file it away but gives Lauren her card.

A month later, the unthinkable happens. Lauren takes the boys to the park and while she rests on a bench she dozes off. When she awakes, her boys are gone. The police are called and a search commences. Soon the babies are found but when Lauren comes to her babies she notices, something is different about them.

“…For the first time, she questioned if she’d know which one was which without the green and yellow colour coding that was only for Patrick’s sake anyway. Had they been changed around, dressed in each other’s colours? Both had the same blue-grey eyes they’d had before they were taken. But Morgan didn’t look like Morgan, not exactly. Riley didn’t either, something about the way his lip curled.
And then she knew, with a terrible certainty. It wasn’t Morgan and Riley, not anymore. Something else was was looking at her, out of the eyes of her babies…”

Lauren knows with a certainty that somehow, the woman had done it. She had stolen Lauren’s twins and replaced them with these creatures who looked and sounded just like her babies. But a mother knows her children, Lauren thought, and she knew that these were not her babies.

Jo Harper is working the abduction of Lauren’s boys, but there seems to be alot more to this case than first meets the eye. Stranger still is Lauren’s reaction to her found babies. Could this be some sort of postpartum depression Lauren is suffering from or is there some truth to what she is saying happened to her children. As she digs deeper she begins to unravel a legend and a tragedy that seems to return during the hottest years, when the water level drops. But what Jo is beginning to realize, is that Lauren may pose the biggest threat to the safety of her boys.

Little Darlings is a terrific novel that skirts the gap between psychological thriller and paranormal mystery. Golding writes about a young mother’s descent into paranoia and madness and then makes the reader question if in fact it is just that. The thought throughout the novel that Lauren is right and that the babies are in fact changelings is dread that hangs over the novel. Is it possible or is Lauren losing her mind. These are questions that will have the reader guessing until the last page.

A really good read!

Dark Asylum by E. S. Thomson

Dark Asylum by E. S. Thomson is the second book in the Jem Flockhart series and has me thinking that I really need to hunt down book one. Because if its even half as good as this one is, then it is definitely well worth the read. The hero of our book, Jem, is a woman passing herself off as a man in Victorian England in the year 1851, when the gruesome murder of a prominent doctor in his own insane asylum brings her face to face with a horrifying killer.

“…The first time I saw the devil I was six years old. The vicious thoughts that filled his head were etched upon his face in every line and shadow. I saw greed and malice in his grinning shrivelled lips, lust and death in his black, empty eyes. He gave me nightmares, and the others laughed at me for being so fearful. After all, it was only a crude woodcut on the back of one the boys’ penny bloods. Only Goblin understood. He didn’t laugh. He said that I should put the image form my mind and that I would soon forget. But I never did. And when I saw the devil again, many years later, I knew exactly who he was…”

In 1851, in the dark rooms of Angel Meadow Asylum, the chief physician to the insane lay murdered. Dr. Rutherford, his head bashed in, his ears cut off and his lips and eyes sewn shut in a black pool of his own blood. Inside his mouth, they would find his ears. The police quickly arrest one of the inmates for this horrible crime but to Jem Flockhart, the apothecary and his friend Will Quartermain the truth is something far more complex. The vicious attention to detail and calculation used to do this deed seems beyond the abilities of the inmates of the asylum. No, to Flockhart and Quartermain, there seems a far more devious and evil mind at work. When a second body is found, another doctor at the asylum, the duo realize there is far more to these murders than what is revealing itself.

“…I crouched at Will’s side and put my arms about him. He had buried his face in his hands, unable to look at what lay before us. But I could not allow my emotions to overwhelm me. I had to think clearly, to try to understand what had happened. I forced myself to look at Dr. Golspie, at the blood that pooled about his head, at the way his features had been obliterated, turned into a hideous mockery of a face by a clumsy and cold-blooded hand. Like Dr. Rutherford, he had been stabbed through the head with a medical instrument-in this case I recognized the ebony handle of a curved double-edged amputation knife. Why would Dr. Golspie have such a thing? He was not a surgeon. I looked closer. Was it engraved? Some of the more egotistical surgeons like to stamp their presence on their equipment. I pulled out my handkerchief and wiped the handle. Three letters. R.J.G…”

Now Jem and Will must hunt the killer by delving into the secrets of not only the inmates of the asylum but the very doctors themselves. How far had these men gone in their singular pursuit of science. Untouchable, as they were, had they themselves committed atrocities in the name of science upon the less fortunate who had no voice? And could Jem and Will bring their acts into the light and upon the courts of justice or will they too, be held under the control of the Dark Asylum?

Though slow in some points, Dark Asylum is a terrific tale of class and madness. The phrase, the inmates are running the asylum, may never have been better said. The Doctors, though convincing themselves that they are doing what they do for the betterment of humanity are too often less human than the patients left in their care. The hubris is something very close to that of Victor Frankenstein and if you have ever read the book, you would easily realize that Victor was the monster and not the creature he created.

Dark Asylum is a tale of madness. A madness from years of abuse and degradation and of the society that held men of privilege unaccountable for their actions. It is also a tale of a woman, raised since childhood to hide herself so that she may claim her place in this very society. It is also the tale of others who never had the chance and whose suffering is a sign of madness and not of those whose lives have been destroyed by a darker purpose.

A terrific book that should not be missed.

Don’t Close Your Eyes by Holly Seddon

 

 

Don’t Close Your Eyes by Holly Seddon is one of those thrillers that comes along and separates itself from the rest of the pack by the sheer force of its storytelling. The twists and turns and red herrings that abound are so subtle, and so perfectly placed, that you as the reader will literally stop reading, flip pages backwards, just so you can make sure that what you read, really did just happen!

Twin sisters Robin and Sarah grew up in a idyllic life. While their mom was often self-involved and distant, their father doted on both of them. Growing up with their best friend near by, the two families spent an incredible amount of time together. But unfortunately this also leads to the ruin of the two families as infidelities tear them apart. Now Sarah is sent to live with her mother and Robin stays with her father. Time and distance separate the sisters and they drift apart.

Robin goes on to be a part of a punk rock band until the day her mental issues finally take hold and she finds herself unable to face the world. She has become a shut in, refusing to venture out beyond the door of her apartment. She has cutoff contact with everyone around her and even has her groceries delivered and dropped at her door. She spends her time staring out of her windows and spying on her neighbors.

Sarah has worked hard to have the perfect life. But her husband and his family have kicked her out of home and denied her access to her daughter. Sarah will do anything she can to find her way back but the secrets and lies of her past have finally caught up to her. She needs Robin to help her make sense of her past and get her child back.

As the sisters come together again, the dark events of their past come back into the light and Robin begins to realize that there is much more to Sarah and what happened in their lives than she ever realized.

This may be the most intricately written novel of the year. Seriously, if this was a film and you blinked, you would miss something changes the entire complexity of the story. It is much. It is far more than the story of two girls, it is the tale of two families torn apart and then forced back together by the selfishness of a pair of adults. One of the most powerful characters in the book is the boy who would become their stepbrother Callum. His secrets and his fear of his father hints at the horrors to come. His inability to protect the girls leads him to the point of being the agent of their trauma. What ties the families together is a shared anguish. An anguish that seems to have followed them into adulthood and controls the lives they now try to live.

This is one of those books were all the characters are tainted. There are victims here, yes, but they are also capable of harming others as well as themselves. There are twists and turns and cliffs that even though you see them coming, you cannot help but fly off of. Robin is the angry sister and Sarah the peacemaker but that is deceptive, and Callum, well Callum may be one of the most complex characters there is.

This is not a feel good book. No white knights and happy endings. It is simply one of the better novels of the year and in itself, one of the better twists to be found.

 

The Breakdown by B.A. Paris

The Breakdown by B.A. Paris is a psychological thriller about the descent into madness or the fear of it. Told through the eyes and mind of Cass, a woman whose mother suffered from dementia at a young age and who is paranoid that she is going to fall prey to the same disease.

“…I rack my brains, trying to remember, trying to guess what we might have decided to buy. It could be anything-perfume, jewelry, a book-but nothing rings a bell. Had I forgotten? Memories of Mum, uncomfortable ones, flood my mind and I push them away quickly. It isn’t the same, I tell myself fiercely, I am not the same. By tomorrow, I’ll have remembered…”

Driving home on a rainy night from a party, Cass takes a dark rural road through the woods against her husband’s advice. Along the way she spots a car pulled over but she knows that she cannot stop. Who knows why the car is stopped. It could be a trap on this secluded road. As she passes she thinks she sees a woman in the drivers seat. But she does not want to take the chance, she has heard of gangs setting traps on dark roads for people who stop to help broken down vehicles. But what she learns the next morning horrifies her.

“…In the bathroom, I lock the door and turn on the shower, wanting to drown out the voice in my head telling me that the woman who’s been found dead is the one that I passed in my car last night. Feeling horribly shaky, I sit down on the edge of the bath and bring up the Internet, looking for news. It’s Breaking News on the BBC but there are no details. All it says is that a woman has been found dead in her car near Browbury in Sussex…”

Cass can’t stop thinking what might have been had she stopped. Could she have saved the woman or is it possible that she might have become another victim of the killer. Now she is wondering if she is safe. Could she have been spotted late that night on that road. Does the killer know it was her? This goes through her mind as well as the possibility that it is all in her mind. That she is creating a reality around the murder of the woman. That she is now showing signs of the illness that destroyed her mother.

“…And while I wait, he asks me gentle questions, wanting to know what triggered my meltdown. I listen as Matthew explains about me barricading myself into the sitting room while he was at work and, when Dr. Deakin asks if there’s been any other worrying behavior on my part. Matthew mentions that the week before I’d become hysterical because I thought I saw a huge knife lying on the side in the kitchen when in reality it was only a small kitchen knife. I sense them exchanging glances and they begin speaking about me as if I’m not there. I hear the word ‘breakdown’ but I don’t care because the pills have already begun to work their magic…”

This is the essence of The Breakdown. Is it a murder mystery of a woman on a secluded road in the woods or is it the loss of Cass’s mind and memory as she slips into madness? It is also its greatest weakness of this novel. If fluctuates between the two and never really develops one or the other. Paris’s first novel, Behind Closed Doors, is much more intense and driven. The Breakdown is a step backward in plot and storytelling.

What Lies Between Us – Nayomi Munaweera

What Lies Between Us by Nayomi Munaweera is a story that is as dark and disturbing as it is illuminating. A tragic glimpse into the soul of troubled young woman torn between two worlds and two senses of her own self.

What follows is the confession of a woman who has committed an unspeakable crime. But to understand it, to begin to accept the truth of her acts, you have to journey back with her. To her own childhood. To a life that has never seemed to be her own.

“…Sometimes nothing happens for months. I do not have to start at each sound; I do not have to run for cover if I hear him behind me. Some mysterious cease-fire and he is just my old friend Samson. I am diligent, but in these times he is nice, gathering guavas and avocados for me, pointing out the fishing birds in the trees. These kinds of things do not happen to girls like me. I am from a good family. I go to a good school. I have an Amma. So how can this be happening in my own home…”

The young girl, Ganga, grows up in a beautiful home in the island nation of Sri Lanka. She is privileged by most of the islanders standards. But life in her home is an illusion. Her mother is deeply troubled and her father absent. Much of the time she is left alone with the servants. One of which is the young man named Samson. Ganga learns much growing up in her home. She learns that she must not disturb her mother. She learns that the smallest thing can cause a violent outburst. She learns that there is a difference in her world on how women are viewed. There is a distinct line between what a good girl is and what a bad girl is. She learns that her changing body is evil and that it leads men astray from their own good natures. She learns that a woman is always in the wrong. She learns this, from the women in her world.

“…They stop suddenly, remembering Puime and me with our ears open wide in their midst. I know the girl they are talking about. What happened to her? I know it has something to do with what has just happened to me, which is called “falling off the jambu tree,” for the bright red fruit of the jambu. It has to do with boys and maybe even something to do with what happens to me when Samson catches me alone, something bad and secret for which only a girl is responsible, for which only a girl has to pay. I know that these women will not keep the secret. By tomorrow, the girl’s reputation will be dust. Even her marriage will not protect her from the barbs of gossip. Shame is female; shame is the price I must pay for this body. The fabric of my white dress is suddenly cloying.
Amma says, ‘Why don’t you two go to your room.’ We slip out. Climbing the stairs, Puime whispers, ‘God, when I grow up, I’m going to drink arrack in the garden with the men. I’m not going to sit around drinking lime juice and gossiping about every single person.’
I nod. I feel as though I have watched an execution…”

But when tragedy tears apart her family, Ganga and her mother must immigrate to America where her Aunt and Uncle live. Now this young girl must reinvent herself as an American teenager to fit in. From clothing to school to shaving, the world is vastly different for Ganga and soon the past she left behind is almost all but forgotten. Except at night when the dreams come and the specter of Samson lurks in the shadows of her bedroom.

As Ganga begins her own family, she must find a way to escape the past. But how can she escape what is inside of her?

“…Some years ago, at a Chinese bile farm, a mother moon bear did something thought to be outside the realm of her animal nature. Hearing her cub crying from inside a nearby crush cage, she broke through her own iron bars. The terrified men cowered, but she did not maul them. Instead, she reached for her cub, pulled it toward her, and strangled it. Then she smashed her head against the wall until she died.
Why do I tell this story? Only because it tells us everything we need to know about the nature of love between a mother and a child…”

What Lies Between Us is a terrific book. It has the potential to be more than just entertainment. It has a cloak of importance around it that bears scrutiny and then perhaps, some sense of awe. There are passages here that some will find too disturbing. Munaweera handles them very well. Told through the blurred visions of a child, she does not dwell on them but realizes the importance of sharing the experience with the reader. The trauma. The pain. The shame and the misplaced blame all lead up to the mental and emotional destruction that is Ganga. All of which leads to the final act of horror that is unforgivable.

The dysfunctional relationship between Ganga and her mother are as central to this novel as the abuse. The lack of love she felt from her mother as a child and the need to gain approval transform into something so different as she gets older. The cultural shock as well and then the relationship with her husband. All these build and build until the finale.

What Lies Between Us is a book that will not be forgotten easily after the reading. It will cling with you, an aftertaste or scent that lingers, but it will stay.

A very good read.

Marrow by Tarryn Fisher

Marrow by Tarryn Fisher is not what you expect. This is not a coming of age story. This is not a crime noir mystery. This is not a book of erotica masquerading as women’s fiction. This is not a young adult novel. There are a lot of genres that this book is not, but what it is, what it does…is reach deep down into the dank and shadowing place you pretend doesn’t exist in your soul and grabs it by the balls and squeezes. Squeezes until you cannot breathe, cannot cry out, cannot even think…

“…Margo,’ she says. I wait for the command, breath bated. This time she is looking at my reflection, slightly behind hers. ‘You’re not a pretty girl. You could at least lose the weight. What you don’t have in the face, you can have in the body.’
So I can sell it like you do?
‘I’ll try, Mama.’
Submission. That’s my job.
‘Margo, you can go now,’ she says. ‘Stay in your room…”

Margo lives in the Bone. Its a neighborhood where she lives with her mother. Her mother who services men who come by at night. Margo must lock herself in her room while they are there so they never see her. In a place of poverty and crack houses, she is the daughter of the whore on the block. Everyone knows Margo and her mother, but Margo wants a different life for herself. She finds a job and goes to school. She cares for the other kids on the street and makes friends with the young man on street named Judah. Judah is wheelchair bound but he doesn’t let that keep him down. His dream is to someday leave the Bone.

“…You have to understand something about the Bone,’ Judah says. ‘Every bad thing that happens here reminds people of what they’re trying to forget. When you’re rich and you see stuff like this on TV, you hug your children and feel grateful it’s not you. When you’re from the Bone, you hug your children and pray you’re not next…”

Then one morning a little girl goes missing and for Margo, this goes too far in the Bone. She throws herself into searching for the child and to her horror, she begins to piece together just what happened to the child. For Margo, she can no longer sit back and accept what happens in the Bone.

“…Judah and I outgrow the rest of the Bone and cleave to one another. Nothing is better than the discovery of another living, breathing human, who fights the same as you do, loves the same as you do, and understands you with such clarity that it feels erotic. A friendship between the fat, ugly girl and the crippled, handsome boy. It is a friendship that we both had waited for. One we both needed…”

But leaving the Bone is not enough for Margo, no for her, she has to do something much more…

“…It takes time to plan someone’s murder….”

Margo comes to realize that she cannot truly leave the Bone, because wherever she goes, she takes it with her.

Okay, this book totally took me by surprise. I’m not sure what I expected but the story behind this tale was not it. I think perhaps I was expecting something along the lines of a dark young adult novel but instead what I found was a well plotted and paced novel of a descent into madness by a young girl who had everything working against her. Margo’s growth and her subsequent actions seem rationale on some level, though perhaps extreme. Judah is the consistent voice of reason through the story but even his voice is ignored as Margo rejects him after his, in her mind, act of betrayal by going on with his life. It is only later that we see that there is so much more to the truth of that act than what is initially understood.

In the end, Margo is forced to choose between her truth and the reality around her and as a reader, you are asked to choose as well.

A terrific story and character that rises above the writing skill of the author and that is not a knock on this book. It is, quite simply, the best of compliments. This is a good story, part Alice In Wonderland and Boys In the Hood.

Not to be missed!!

Pretty Baby by Mary Kubica (Book Review)

Pretty Baby by Mary Kubica is one of those rare stories that is nothing like what I expected and takes me into a place and a sense that is at once incredible and completely unnerving. A complex tale of damage, pain and the unending emotional and mental tragedy of grief.

“…The doctor used the word hysterectomy. I lay in bed at night when I should be asleep, considering that word, what it means. To the doctor, to Chris, it was term, a medical procedure. To me it was carnage, plain and simple. The annihilation of Juliet and Zach, Sophia and Alexis. The end of that vision of shabby chic comforters and homeschooling.
But of course, by then Juliet was already gone, a simple D&C procedure that was anything but simple. There was no way to know whether or not she was a girl-that’s what the doctor said, what Chris restated time and again, that there was no way to know-and yet I knew with certainty it was Juliet who was discarded as medical waste, right along with my uterus, my cervix,parts of my vagina…”

Heidi Wood sees the girl on the train platform, clutching an infant, in the pouring rain. Heidi has always been a very caring woman. She works for a nonprofit organization and takes in stray cats. She watches the girl as she boards the train. The next day the girl is there again. She is homeless and starving, and Heidi knows, that the baby is starving too. Heidi cannot just do nothing. She offers the girl her coat and some food, but even that does not seem to be enough.

“…The front door opens and there they stand like two drowned rats. There’s a baby in Heidi’s arms, a scent far worse than cumin wafting from the girl. I rub at my eyes, certain I’m hallucinating, certain my Heidi would never bring a homeless girl into our home, into the home where her own daughter lives and breathes…”

Heidi brings the girl Willow home with her, ignoring the protests of her husband Chris and her own daughter Zoe. Chris is traveling quite a bit for work and Heidi and Willow are left on their own. Chris is concerned about the safety of his family and researches Willow’s past. What he finds feels him with fear. But what is happening in his home is not what he expects. His daughter Zoe is left at practice as Heidi is obsessed with Willow and the baby. Forgetting time and again to pick up her own child from practice and school. Heidi, who wakes at night to look in on the baby. Lifting the sleeping child into her arms and cradling her. Heidi who begins to convince herself that she needs to protect the baby, that only she can care for it. Heidi who begins to believe that everyone poses a threat to the baby. Even its mother Willow.

I have tried very hard here not to give away too much about the novel. This is one to be read and enjoyed for yourself. Kubica tells the tale in a three person narrative. Heidi, Willow and Chris. In Willow’s narrative we learn of her painful and abusive past. Of her need to escape from the reality she was forced to endure and the of the dead and bloodied bodies that were left behind. Chris is at a crossroads of loving his wife and battling the desire of another woman. He takes care not to upset Heidi whose suspicions and insecurities feed his loneliness. And Heidi, whose grief and trauma have never left her. They were just hidden. Buried beneath a facade of care and love. She is a good mother. She deserved the opportunity to be a good mother.

Pretty Baby is a tense emotional thriller that will have fans of Girl on the Train and Dark Places rejoicing. Kubica is carving out her place on the book shelves of modern day emotional thrillers and she is doing it with good stories and damn good writing.

The Pocket Wife by Susan H Crawford (Book Review)

The Pocket Wife by Susan H Crawford is a noir thriller with terrific characters and a puzzle of a murder mystery. This is modern day Hitchcockian crime novel from a fresh new voice.

Dana Catrell is wife on the edge of her sanity. Recovering from a past of addiction and emotional instability, she finds herself and her marriage challenged by her neighbor who has a picture of Dana’s husband and another woman. They argue about it over drinks and then Dana doesn’t really remember what happened after that. The next thing she knows is her neighbor, Celia, is found dead in a pool of blood.

Detective Jack Moss picks up the case, but he has his own reasons for wanting to find out who murdered Celia. A broken marriage and a failure at fatherhood, Jack finds himself drawn to the case and the possible connection it may have to his last remaining son. Jack finds Dana as a possible suspect, but soon finds that there is much more to this crime than meets the eye.

Dana finds her husbands behavior strange and his reluctance to engage in conversation over the murder of their neighbor even so. She slowly begins to realize that there may have been more to her husband and Celia’s relationship and perhaps Celia’s desire to show Dana the picture was fueled by more than sisterhood. But at the center of it all is Dana’s knowledge that her grip on her own sanity is tenuous at best. Could half of what she believes to be true be solely in her mind.

The Pocket wife is told through the eyes and mind of the two main characters in Dana and Jack. But it is Dana who drives the novel and in her Susan Crawford has created a main character who is both courageous and maddening. Her emotional laspes leave the reader at times wondering if her narrative is factual or all in her mind. So like Dana, the reader left to sift through the clues and then determine which are true and which are not. The story evolves and opens with various clues dropping here and there. You will miss them at first and then as it goes forward, the reader will realize…”Hey, wait a second…” exactly. This is that kind of book. A terrific mystery with rich characters that will stay with the reader long after the last page is turned.

A terrific debut novel and a great read.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years Of Pilgrimage – Haruki Murakami (Book Reveiw)

Title – Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Author – Haruki Murakami

Summary –

Tsukuru Tazaki is a young man who has experienced incredible loss. He has lived the majority of his adult life alone, but unable to connect with anyone on a relationship level that is sustainable. He doesn’t know why and until it is pointed out to him by his current girlfriend.

He retells the story of his teenage years and the four friends he had. All of their names translated into a color, except for his. He always felt that somehow that showed how he was less than them. But they cared for him anyway and with them he felt part of something very special.

Until the day he returned back home from college, on a weekend break, to have each of his friends refuse to take his calls. Until finally one of them calls him and tells Tsukuru that the group wants nothing to do with him any longer and that they would rather he never called them again. Shocked, he agrees to leave them alone. This episode has shaped his whole being into adulthood. Leaving him a solitary and untrusting man. Unable to sustain or build a true relationship with anyone.

“…Perhaps he didn’t commit suicide then because he couldn’t conceive of a method that fit the pure and intense feelings he had toward death. But method was beside the point. If there had been a door within reach that led straight to death, he wouldn’t have hesitated to push it open, without a second thought, as if it were just a part of ordinary life…”

His girlfriend convinces Tsukuru, that after all these years, he needs to search out these friends and find out why they cast him out. That he would never truly be complete until he finds out why they abandoned and shunned him.

Reluctantly, but knowing he needed to, Tsukuru begins his pilgrimage to find out the truth. In doing so, he will unravel truths and secrets about himself and his friends. And the lies they have weaved around one another for the last decade. This journey for Tsukura is one of self discovery and redemption. Of forgiveness given and needed for all involved. Of friendship and memories that can never be reclaimed, but yet, perhaps better left to the past.

Review –

I am left with mixed emotions on this novel. For that alone it should be read. Any book that can illicit from the reader a sense of emotion should be recognized for what it truly is.
Damn good writing.
My issue is simple. If I had known Tsukuru Tazaki, I would probably have asked the depressing, self involved, emotionally handicapped whiney ass to stop calling me too and that I no longer wanted to be friends with him. Like ever. But I would have told him why. That he was a depressing, self involved, emotionally handicapped whiney ass butt wipe and honestly, because your name does not translate into a color you are less than everyone else? Seriously? Instead his friends simply refuse to talk to him and he, for his part, simply accepts this proclamation and tries to go on. Spiraling even deeper into what can only be a suicidal depression.
So what is good about this story?
Writing. Damn good writing! And did we mention that this damn good writing is a translation as well?
I am convinced that Haruki Murakami could write out my grocery list and make it dramatic and compelling. The depths of Tsukuru’s mind that Murakami plumbs to describe the pain and confusion he feels by being ostracized by his friends is handled with a grace and poise that is rarely seen in American novels. Murakami does it with effortless ease, or so it seems. For all of this is from Tsukuru’s thoughts, dreams and muses. On the outside, as is true in Japanese culture, nothing is shown.
Murakami is exploring not only the human mind, but the tender and often confusing emotions that dwell within.
Damn good writing. A very good read.