Fiction Addict

Genre: Classic s Revisited

Publisher:  Quirk Classics

Publication Date:  March 2010

Reviewed by Jennifer Roman

In a take on the classic Pride and Prejudice, Hockensmith takes a leap from the original Bennet saga and turns the privileged family into zombie-killing warriors.  While the proper Mrs. Bennet fusses and frets, Mr. Bennet transforms his five daughters from silly, socialite girls into nunchuk-wielding, sword-bearing, killing machines.

At a local man’s funeral, the girls notice that the “deceased” is actually coming back to life as a zombie.  Their father rushes to the front of the church and cuts off the “dreadful’s” head before he can do more harm, but this change from dead to undead announces the coming of many more undead.  Knowing what the future holds, Oscar Bennet enlists the help of his five daughters: Elizabeth, Jane, Kitty, Mary, and Lydia.  He also summons help from the King’s Army, which arrives just in time to train for the battle of its life.  The ensuing training and killing are actually quite hilarious.  In one scene, the girls awaken in the middle of the night because they hear a noise.  Thinking it is a zombie, they rush down the hall just in time to catch their mother trying to enter their father’s bedchamber for a romantic interlude.  After realizing what they interrupted, they are more mortified than if they HAD seen a zombie.

There are some parallels to the original Pride and Prejudice, but the changes turn the once-classic into a campy romp of fun and hilarity.  While keeping some of the same style of language, Hockensmith manages to update the text and make it a pleasant, quick read.  The reader gets to see the English propriety as somewhat silly and frivolous: Mrs. Bennet and her “high society” friends get into a disagreement over the girls’ training.  There is to be a ball, and it is Elizabeth’s début.  Because of her “scandalous” training, however, the hostess of the ball refuses to invite her.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls is innocuous for just about any reader.  Keeping with English propriety, there is no foul language.  In fact, the girls are not allowed to say the word “zombie” because it is improper.  Instead they call them “the Zed word.”  There are allusions to sex, but only in the vaguest form.  There are descriptions of beheading and the cutting off of limbs, but not in a grisly, raw manner.  Even those with the weakest of stomachs should be able to handle that.

Hockensmith manages to combine the old with the new in PP&Z with wit and humor.  He makes fun of late 1800s English propriety and throws in some political satire as well.  The story is quirky and fun, and most of all, an easy read.  Those looking for some fun and humor should enjoy this off-the-wall tale.

Genre: Psychological, Literary

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Publication Date: January 2010

Reviewed by Marianne Peters

Tim Farnsworth seems to be a lucky man, with a wife and daughter, a thriving law practice, and a large home in the suburbs. Lucky except for one thing: periodically, inexplicably, he begins to walk.  He walks until he collapses, and then his wife Jane comes to find him wherever he has ended up, asleep, sometimes frostbitten or injured. After he sleeps, the walking starts again. He sees doctors, psychologists, even gurus, but no one can fix his problem. To explain his absences from work, he tells his puzzled partners at the law firm that his wife has terminal cancer.

Joshua Ferris, author of the novel Then We Came to the End, has penned a heartbreaking story about a family in the midst of a mysterious health crisis. Farnsworth’s illness is never named or cured. It goes into sudden remission, and then starts up again just as suddenly. While he copes with the distressing realities of walking himself into exhaustion, his wife Jane and daughter Becka cope with their own fear, guilt, anger and frustration – ambivalent feelings that would be familiar to anyone caring for a chronically ill loved one.

Tim and Jane Farnsworth also struggle to maintain their affection for each other, playing out their roles as husband and wife, but also as impaired person and caregiver. When does he decide to abandon treatment? When does she decide that enough is enough?

The Unnamed is not a cheery read, but it is a mesmerizing one. Joshua Ferris’ lucid writing lifts his characters from the page until they are flesh and blood, and we find ourselves asking, would I do the same thing? Would I give up or hang on? The walking itself is a device, the difficult circumstance that allows these characters to demonstrate their strengths and their loyalties, while simultaneously forcing them to expose their weaknesses to themselves and to each other. The truth about them – about us – is painful, but redemptive. We all have weaknesses that hardship will reveal. And once everything is revealed, the only thing left to do is to keep walking.

Review copy provided by Little, Brown and Company.

Genre: Literary

Publisher: Random House

Released: June 2009

Reviewed by Jonathan Schindler

Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin tells bit by bit the stories of transplant and native New Yorkers in the 1970s as their lives intersect and connect in unexpected ways, mostly through the common experience of a single event: Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the World Trade Center’s towers in 1974. Despite the characters’ varying backgrounds—an Irish friar and his brother, a streetwalking mother-daughter pair, a Park Avenue judge and his wife, to name a few—they are all bound together by what they’ve witnessed. And directly or indirectly, their lives are forever changed as a result.

The book’s plot is hard to describe because all of the characters are so interconnected—where one plotline seems to be winding down, another is just getting started. McCann’s weaving all these lives together could have easily become convoluted or contrived, but it is to McCann’s credit that it is not so. Characters walk in and out of each other’s stories in a way you imagine they would do in real life. The characters don’t feel like symbols, archetypes, ideas; they appear as real people do and exist in all the paradoxes of humanity. McCann has created a cast of diverse and believable characters and deftly intones the voice of each, each section being narrated by or around a single character. He avoids focusing on a single group and instead provides a true city cross-section, literally from the bottom up—from the prostitutes on the street to the very height of the World Trade Center. The diversity in the cast allows McCann to explore the spectrum of human emotions, opportunities, and relationships. (It also means that the book has a fair amount of adult content, especially language, so sensitive readers should be cautious.)

The characters in Let the Great World Spin are what make this book worth reading. They are believable and sympathetic, and when they hurt or are dealing with crisis, it is easy to become entangled in their lives. Characters face violence, imprisonment, prejudice, grief, doubt, sacrifice, and death, but above all this walks Petit on his tightrope, seemingly oblivious of the world spinning out of control below him. Petit’s stunning and beautiful act points to a great truth, one worthy of being at the center of a book like this: The world is a difficult place to live in, full of pain, but it is also full of beauty and thus provides a reason to hope.

Let the Great World Spin is readable and well written (though there are occasional flashes of distracting literariness), and the descriptions appeal to the reader’s senses, allowing for an immersive reading experience. Let the Great World Spin is truly a beautiful book, deserving of its National Book Award win.

Review copy provided by Random House

Genre: Literary/Fantasy

Publisher: Henry Holt and Company

Publication Date: January 2010

Reviewed by Jaci Miller

Midas Crook is a young loner, happier to photograph life than to live it. Scarred by an emotionally estranged father and a mentally distant mother, Midas is unprepared when he meets Ida McLaird, a strange girl determined to live life fully. Soon, Midas learns of Ida’s horrifying condition—she is slowly turning to glass. Despite his issues with his past, he soon falls for Ida and the two struggle to find a cure for Ida’s strange illness before she becomes wholly transformed.

In this magical tale, author Ali Shaw crafts a world sprinkled with the strange that somehow feels completely at home; the magical elements in the story seem as though they could occur in ordinary life to anyone. St. Hauda’s Land, the setting for The Girl with Glass Feet, could easily be a real island in the frigid, far north. Shaw’s lyrical style paints beautiful pictures of this fictional land while fresh and innovative language characterizes this quiet tale. It’s a book meant to be read slowly and savored, much like Sue Monk Kidd’s work.

However, Shaw appears to love words more than his story. At times, lovely language takes precedence over storytelling and the pacing of the tale suffers for it. Sadly, I felt a strong desire to skim sections of the book as they could have been shortened with no real loss of plot. The author clearly establishes setting and tone so his need for a full description of each setting at the outset of each chapter pulled the story down.

As a first-time novelist, Shaw succeeds in making the mysterious premise of glass metamorphosis plausible to the reader and is clearly a master wordsmith. The book is a strong effort that would benefit from a few editorial snips.

Review copy provided by Henry Holt and Company.

Genre: Literary, Historical Fiction

Publisher: New American Library

Publication Date: May 2009

Reviewed by Jaci Miller

Pasha, a teenager in 1970s Iran, falls in love with Zari, the girl next door who happens to be betrothed to Doctor, a counterculture philosopher and a friend of Pasha’s. When Pasha accidentally reveals Doctor’s hiding place to the Shah’s secret police, Pasha feels racked by guilt. As he and his friends grieve, they grow to hate the secret police even more. Then, on the day of the Shah’s birthday, Zari makes a drastic choice born of this grief that thrusts the group of friends apart.

In Rooftops of Tehran, Mahbod Seraji attempts to take the reader into the world of a turbulent region but ultimately falls short. The reader expects to be transported to another culture—to smell, feel, taste, hear Iran—and instead remains in his living room watching wooden characters being puppeted through the action. Seraji violates “show, don’t tell,” the mantra of great writers, with his explanations and adverbs. He steps outside of the story to paint a setting instead of interweaving it into the book and he has Pasha, as narrator, explore lengthy tangents from a melodramatic point-of-view.

Portions of the plotline ring false and feel unfounded, while teen angst seems to dominate the narrative. While a measure of this is acceptable in a coming-of-age tale, it’s monotonous to bemoan heartbrokenness, the cruelty of God or the pain in one’s soul in each chapter.

Rooftops of Tehran offers a golden opportunity to present a truly unique culture and worldview but falls far short of the sweeping drama promised by the book’s cover copy. The Reader’s Guide in the back is far more interesting as it reveals his personal journey and experiences. Seraji shines in his discussion there and may be better suited to writing memoir.

Review copy provided by New American Library publishers.

Genre: Literary, Historical Fiction

Publisher: Hawthorne Books/Riverhead Books

Publication Date: 2007

Reviewed by Jaci Miller

The Moores are a coal-mining family in Depression-era Alabama. Tess, the middle of the family’s three children, witnesses a frightening event—a strange woman dropping an infant into the family’s well. When the police investigation reveals little, Tess and her older sister, Virgie, search for the mother of the infant among the women in their town.

The girls’ parents, Albert and Leta, both work desperately hard—Albert on the farm and in the mine, and Leta at home—to provide for their family. They grow very concerned when Tess begins having nightmares about the dead infant. Then Jack, the youngest child, is involved in a severe accident, straining the family even further. As the Moores struggle emotionally, financially and physically, friendships are tested and the truth about the infant in the well is revealed.

The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips is an understated account of family, struggle, race relations and growing up. What could easily become a story with a sensationalistic plot remains believable and honest. The tone is as down-to-earth as Phillips’s characters and readers find themselves feeling right at home in the mine, on the country roads and in the Moores’ small house. Told from the point-of-view of each family member in turn, readers view the full family dynamic at work: Albert’s work ethic, Leta’s self-sacrifice, Virgie’s tentative adolescence, Tess’s joyfulness and Jack’s memories of childhood all combine into a humble work of beautiful family life.

Genre: Literary, Current Events

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Released: June 2008

Reviewed by Jonathan Schindler

Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them, released in 2008 and brought to popular attention through its recent inclusion in Oprah’s Book Club, comprises three short stories and two novellas, all set in Africa and all told either about or through the eyes of children. It is by no means an easy book to get through, though Akpan is to be applauded for his writing ability. The subject matter is what makes this book a difficult, albeit eye-opening, read.

The stories in this collection treat issues of child prostitution, human trafficking, religious persecution, and genocide, among other things, all in their relation to children. It is difficult to read about child suffering, but in Akpan’s capable hands, this sordid subject matter is simultaneously viewed with unflinching candor and indomitable hope. Thus, though he tells us these stories and forces our eyes open, he shows the resilience of children and the grace that is present even in seemingly hopeless situations. He is an adept Virgil, guiding us through hell and bringing us out the other side.

Take “Luxurious Hearses,” one of the two novellas, which has as its setting the religious persecution of northern and southern Nigeria. Jubril, a Muslim boy, flees from the north after his Muslim friends turn on him for having a Christian father and brother (or, perhaps more to the point, because they owe him money). After hiding in the home of a compassionate Muslim, Jubril gets on a bus full of Christians bound for southern Nigeria, where his father lives. The Muslims hate the Christians and the Christians hate the Muslims, but there are flashes of grace on either side—Muslims harboring Christians in the north and Christians hiding Muslims in the south.

Say You’re One of Them’s title comes from the final story in the collection, “My Parents’ Bedroom,” but it really could be the banner written over any of them. The children in each story are caught in the hazy boundary between two worlds—Christian and Muslim, north and south, Hutu and Tutsi—and the easiest way to make it out of their situation is to pretend to belong to the group in power. The lines are fuzzy, and the labels placed on the characters are not always clear-cut or how those characters might self-identify.

Akpan’s stories are distinctly religious, owing to his being a Jesuit priest. The epigraphs he chose for the book, Daniel 3:17-18 and Micah 6:8, are fitting, giving the reader a framework for human suffering while also calling him to do what he can for the cause of justice. He does an excellent job throughout this collection of pointing out religious hypocrisy and double standards. For example, in “Fattening for Gabon,” Fofo Kpee, who has entered into an agreement to sell his niece and nephew, often uses the Bible to justify his decision. Or in “Luxurious Hearses,” the reader feels for the Christians forced to flee from the north, but it is later revealed that the Muslims are facing similar persecution in the south. There are no easy answers in Akpan’s stories. The picture he paints is nuanced, and it forces the reader to sharply consider his own faith. But while Akpan’s portrayal of religion is not entirely positive, his purpose in writing seems more to rebuild rather than destroy.

I think what makes Say You’re One of Them such an effective collection of stories is that while the setting, dialect, and situation of the story are distinctly African, the truth they reveal is universal. And while the characters’ dialects are at times hard to understand, the stories themselves force readers to look deep into their souls for their answers to tough questions. In America we may not worry about genocide, but who hasn’t been tempted to side with the powerful? Maybe we haven’t thought of selling children into slavery, but who hasn’t been tempted to do what is wrong by the lure of money? Many of us would chafe at the idea of justifying human trafficking using Scripture, but who hasn’t sought to rationalize their behavior before the like-minded? And who hasn’t preferred expedient solutions to righteous ones?

While Say You’re One of Them is not for the faint of heart (or, in some cases, stomach), it is an enlightening and engaging, if not enjoyable, read. It is an exercise in empathy and a call to action. Just as eyes cannot unsee, once you have read Say You’re One of Them, you can’t unread it—you will be changed.