The Lion Trees by Owen Thomas

Available from OTF Literary

This novel has garnered an eye-popping number of awards. I appreciate knowing up front when a book has won at least one award or been shortlisted for an honor but that generally doesn’t impact my impression. It might, in fact, lead me to anticipate a better-than-average reading experience, which sets me up for disappointment if the work doesn’t meet my personal standards.

The Lion Trees did not disappoint. The awards this novel (or diptych of two novels, depending on which production version you’re reading) has pulled in are all well deserved. The story follows a family of four: the aging parents and two adult children, as they muddle through some astonishing changes in their lives. They are, like most of us, ensnared by the tendrils of past hurts, wounds, harms and mistakes. They do their best to help themselves without hurting others too much.

Or at least, most of them try not to harm others. The father is the big exception here. The depth and breadth of his arrogance and selfishness keeps him from seeing even the smallest part of how arrogant and selfish he truly is. Even when his wife leaves him to live in a lesbian commune, he still doesn’t really see how entrenched he is in his own horrible ways.

But of course glimmers arise. He eventually, through a lot of suffering that is at times poignant and at other times funny, manages to start down the path of change. The remainder of his family—a son, a daughter and that AWOL wife—meanwhile manage to implement rather large changes. Not without their own suffering of course but they come out stronger, better people. As one might hope.

This is a long novel, clocking in at some 550,000 words. It is split into two parts mostly I assume for print purposes, because the physical book cannot easily be created or distributed as a single unit. This does lead to some issues with the transition from the first to the second “book.” At the end of the first part, I turned the page and knew that it doesn’t work well as two separate books. I was fortunate to have read it in electronic version and therefore did not feel the pain of having to go hunt down and then wait for delivery of a second print book.

That being said, the end of the first part is only one clear example of this author’s abilities. I literally read the last few paragraphs at the end of part one with a growing emotional response to the characters’ situations and, somewhere in the back of my head where the critical judge sits always hovering above the reading process, thinking that if the author ended it on that page, he was a genius. I turned the page and saw yes, there’s an end, and so yes, this author is significantly talented.

There are a few flaws in this work. Although the book is presented conceptually as if all the family members are equally important, two of the characters fall into a secondary role. These are the daughter and the wife. The wife receives noticeably less attention than the other three, as well. Taken together, it made me wonder if the author isn’t as familiar with female characters and had some trouble drawing them as fully as men in this narrative.

In some ways, even the men the daughter interacts with have equal roles as her, which strengthens the idea that the author has some trouble drawing women on their own (i.e., without the foil or support of male characters). The wife’s scenes in the all-female commune also don’t resonate with strongly drawn secondary characters in her plotline, so that seems to also point to the need for the author to work a bit on female presentation.

The story also drags a bit in book two. I strongly felt the second part could have been trimmed as much as 150 pages and still held the same emotional resonance and achieved the same plot elements. This might also have solved some of the two-book issue for the print version.

These two issues don’t detract much at all from the superb experience and exceptional writing readers will find in The Lion Trees. Pick up these books, and you’ll surely want more from this author.

I received a copy of this through a Goodreads giveaway.

5 stars!

If this story sparked your interest, try Message Stick, a literary novel about an Australian Aboriginal’s search for his family. Available on Amazon, B&N, Kobo and other sites.

All Lies and Jest: Saving the World for Fun and Profit

Kate Harrad

Ghostwoods Books 2011

A fun and freaky jaunt through London’s modern vampire/goth scene with a character who has recently escaped her parents’ home and the clutches of the Resurrected Church that has all but taken over society. Sin and salvation combine when church members whip each other for religiously kinky reasons “climaxing with an impressive image of the post-false-Rapture world.”

Oh, what fun you’ll have with this one! I was provided with a review copy by the publisher…a special thanks to Ghostwoods for that gift!

A sinfully delicious 4 stars

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The Loved Ones by Mary-Beth Hughes

Available from Atlantic Monthly Press June 2, 2015

Now, I’m all for a book that asks a bit more of readers. I’m up for a challenge when entering a fictional world. I love to intereact with different voices that trust me to be intelligent, and to care enough about the time I’m spending with a book to pay attention. Deep attention. To become engaged with individual characters as if they were my friends, or people I’d love to know or know about.

This book seems to be reaching for that but doesn’t strike a good balance. It overreaches and in the process, turns into a confusing mess. It flips around quickly between characters remembered and “on stage,” so to speak, and characters that aren’t important to the narrative moment are intrusive rather than rendered seamlessly into the narrative.

It was like having someone tap you on the shoulder repeatedly while reading to ask you unrelated and irritatingly pointless questions. But since the interruptions arise from the text itself, you can’t ignore the tapping.

I couldn’t get far into this book before putting it down. I was very disappointed because the concept is exactly the kind of idea I love to read about. Here, though, the voice is too jumbled to follow. A little guidance from the author would have been appreciated.

I received an ARC from the publisher so I could write this review.

DNF: No star rating available.

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The Watchers by Jeffrey A. Ballard

Available from New Rochester Publishing, 2015

FREE FOR A LIMITED TIME HERE!

This copy was provided in the hopes that a review would be written. Although I had expected a book, this is actually a long short story. The concept is that a number of individuals can split their awareness and send it out into the world to track criminals, gather information, and all the other things that governments might want done with that skill.

The protagonist is one of these individuals. He knows full well that splitting his awareness multiple times makes it harder for other watchers to watch what he’s doing…but it also risks splitting him into so many fragments he can never compile his consciousness again. The day comes when he must risk everything to save the one person who can save every citizen.

An exceptionally well written and engaging story. The pacing is fast, and since the concept is never buried under garbled language, readers of suspense fiction will love this even if they don’t usually read sci-fi.

5 stars.

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Rivka’s Way by Teri Kanefield

Available from Armon Books, reissued in 2011.

What a beautiful, magnificent story.

By beautiful, I mean well written with a flowing storyline that captures readers—especially those interested in the coming of age tales of young women in historic time periods.

And magnificent doesn’t mean what reviewers usually mean, that it’s full of action stuffed in there just for action’s sake. No, Rivka’s Way is magnificent for all the right reasons to call a book magnificent…because it moves you as a reader, because it takes you into a new world and a new time, because it conveys the world of the protagonists in a manner that creates emotional connections.

The story takes place in Prague in 1778. This is the Jewish quarter, a walled enclave. The wall both protects the community from those who would destroy it and separates members who wish to know about the wider world, the one where change is sweeping through at an ever faster rate.

When Rivka finds the daring to dress as a gentile boy and explore that world, her heart is drawn to many things. The city, its vibrant life, a gentile she meets…and the particular beauty of her own small home world.

This is a story that you won’t easily forget. I would love to see more from this author, and I’ll bet that you’ll agree after reading only a few chapters.

I received a free copy through Goodreads for review.

5 stars!

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Be sure to read the exclusive interview with Jane Smiley here.

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

Anchor Books, Dec 2003

Told in five “books” or parts, this prize-winning novel blew me away. On the surface as quiet and unchanging—or as slowly changing—as its rural setting, the work plunges deep into the lives and relations of a family struggling to keep a farming lifestyle alive.

Having lived in the Midwest and seen the daily struggle of farm families to continue to make something of the work that feeds a nation, I know that Smiley’s depictions are true to life. The details she selects to illuminate the interior feelings of the characters also expand upon their actions. Although mere single lives when considered individually, each of these characters becomes as wide and as wide-ranging as the plains on which they live and work and struggle.

A novel not to be missed. I’ll be sure to seek out more of Smiley’s work.

5 stars

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No Harm Can Come to a Good Man by James Smythe

HarperCollins, Avail Jun 9, 2015

This novel works on so many levels: suspenseful without losing touch with the internal lives of the primary characters, conceptually significant, and very well written. I wasn’t familiar with this author before being provided with an ARC from the publisher but you can bet he’s on my permanent radar now.

No Harm presents a future that seems not so far away. The internet has been harnessed to provide predictions about common life events ranging from what type of rental car someone will prefer to whether they’ll get a promotion. Since every one of us encounters these algorithms while browsing…always a bit creepy when a news site hands me an ad for a shirt I browsed on some other site because it’s so out of touch with where my mind is while reading news articles…the novel’s concept feels real enough.

This is the backdrop of our everyday lives. And for a time, it seems to only be the backdrop of this novel. A man, a good man, decides to run for president only a year after his son drowned in the lake at the family’s second home. His wife and two daughters go along with his plans, supporting him as only a political family can—by tamping down their personalities with more PR-friendly activities. When Laurence’s campaign advisor Amit encourages him to apply for prediction results through ClearVista’s algorithm, his already somewhat difficult race turns tragic.

There’s the fact that ClearVista returns a 0% chance of success…and then there’s the video. Nightmarish for any father, the video shows the country’s worst terror, that of a war veteran who has finally cracked. While Laurence struggles to prove the video’s prediction wrong, Amit takes a twofold path that shores up his own career while trying to shove his candidate back on track. Laurence’s wife works quietly yet with a strength that cannot be questioned to help her husband and save her two remaining children.

The arc follows Laurence down his increasingly fractured decline along with the wife’s staunch support. Only in the final moments is Deanna forced to turn against him. Amit, meanwhile, is the only one to truly take all their fates into his hands and actively work against the prediction and the social machinery that believes in ClearVista with such evangelical fever.

Emotionally gripping and a true novel for our times.

5 stars!