AHML Staff Choices

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When last we saw Lisbeth Salander, she had been shot in the head and hip by her wicked father, and buried alive by her mutant monster brother. As she lies in her hospital room recovering from her critical condition, Mikhail Blomkvist, her rescuer in the previous book (The Girl Who Played With Fire) must prove her innocence. To do so, he must expose a decades-old conspiracy within the Swedish security police that has, among other atrocities, perpetrated a lifetime of abuse aimed at Salander in order to protect the identity of her father, a Soviet defector and longtime secret asset to Sapo. A hornets nest indeed. This exciting finale to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy does not disappoint his fans. Its just too bad it has to end here.

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The Angel’s Game is a prequel to Zafon’s first award-winning novel, The Shadow of the Wind. The same hauntingly mysterious qualities that made The Shadow of the Wind such a great read are present in this book as well, with a bit of a paranormal twist to make things more interesting. The setting once again is a dark, gothic Barcelona, this time in the 1920s. The author approaches his central themes of literature, books and reading from a different direction – from the point of view of another author, instead of a reader. David Martin has come from a childhood of poverty and abuse to become a respected young crime reporter and very popular pulp novelist. But tortured by his own demons and the seemingly haunted old house he lives in, he writes at a frenetic pace as if possessed, and believing that he is dying. Tormented by the fact that the great love of his life has married his best friend, David accepts a commission to write a story that involves him in several murders and threatens his own life. The end of the book leaves you wondering if David was in fact possessed by demons, or did he himself become the demon he so feared.

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A Gate at the Stairs takes place in a small Midwest college town shortly after 9/11. Tassie Keltjin, whose father is a potato farmer in a small Illinois town, and whose Mother is Jewish, is an aimless college freshman. She gets a part-time job as a nanny for a couple who have adopted a beautiful bi-racial 2-year-old girl. Not only does she interview for the job, but she goes through the entire adoption process with the couple, thus becoming completely immersed in their lives. The post-9/11 racial tension and fear in the United States is an understood sideline that doesn’t hold up very well in the story. But it does act as somewhat of a catalyst.

The author, Lorrie Moore, is a highly praised and gifted literary author of short stories filled with sharp wit along with cynicism, wryness coupled with sweetness. This novel is another great example of her talent. The longer literary form of the novel might be a little daunting for her, however. The characters were well developed, but the plot was not. At times, it seemed as if the plot was going nowhere. That being said, Moore’s talent for the metaphor, her sardonic humor and moving way in which she looks at life are definitely worth the time invested in reading A Gate at the Stairs.

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Adam March had it all – a driven, ruthless, self-made millionaire living the life of an Enron executive complete with perfect socialite wife and teen princess daughter. Then he lost it all when he had what his psychiatrist called a “break.” He slapped his personal assistant, Sophie, right across the face when she left him a message that drove him to the brink of despair. It read – “Your sister called.” The problem with that message was that, when Adam was five years old, his sister, Veronica left home, leaving him alone with his widowed Father, who shortly thereafter, placed him in foster care. After this episode, Adam was fired and taken to court by Sophie, where he is sentenced to perform community service at a men’s homeless shelter.

Sharing the spotlight with the protagonist is Chance, a scrappy pit bull mix, who is trying to escape the illegal dog fight circuit. Chance tells his own story in the book, describing with disturbing clarity the horrible mistreatment of dogs in the fighting pit, life on the street, and the dead end atmosphere of animal shelters.

Quite by chance (which is how the dog got his name), Adam and Chance find each other. Along with his work at the homeless shelter, Adam overcomes his past, finding peace and grounding through the unconditional love and loyalty of man’s best friend. One Good Dog is one nice combination of Breakfast at Sally’s, Marley and Me, and Old Yeller, a touching story that is well-written and memorable.

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“’So now get up!’ Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.” One more kick in the side from his drunken father knocks the wind out of him and young Thomas Cromwell is left there in the cold. The year is 1500 in Putney, England, the day that young Thomas fled his cruel ironmonger father and took to the seas to eventually become an expert in banking and finance under the tutelage of the Frescobaldis, a powerful Florentine merchant banker family; fight for the French; study law; become fluent in French, Latin and Italian and become King Henry VIII’s right-hand man and the 1st Earl of Essex, Master Secretary and Viceregent of Spirituals.

Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a very ambitious and lengthy accounting of the life and times of Thomas Cromwell and how he became the powerful chief architect of the Protestant Reformation. This is definitely not recreational reading or the typical “costume drama” historical fiction. But if you can keep all the characters and locations straight, it is well worth the effort. The author paints an incredibly vivid portrait of this very important man in British history, his family who was very dear to him, as well as other influential men of the time, particularly Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and Sir Thomas More (it seems that every other man of that time was named Thomas). Told with compassion and surprising humor, Cromwell’s commitment to the freedom of England and his influence on the events that led to the creation of the Church of England were the endgame of this powerbroker of Tudor England.

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This book will make you think twice about opening any e-mail attachment! At the heart of this intriguing novel is identity theft and the seemingly unrelated lives of three people that unwittingly become involved in it. Miles Cheshire longs to get on with his life, but feels he can never fully accomplish this until he finds his twin brother Hayden, the “evil” twin. Hayden, who has been missing for ten years, does not want to be found. He has covertly moved from place to place, deftly covering his tracks along the way, and taking on new identities and new lives as he goes.

Recent high school graduate and newly orphaned, Lucy Lattimore escapes her small hometown with her charming former history teacher George Orson. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But Lucy soon finds herself involved in a dangerous embezzling scheme.

My whole life is a lie, thinks Ryan Schuyler, who has recently learned the man he thought was his uncle Jay is actually his birth father. In response, he walks off the Northwestern University campus, hops on a bus, and breaks loose from his meaningless existence. Presumed dead, Ryan decides to hook up with the man he thinks is his father and ends up helping him run identity-theft scams.

The author deftly intertwines these story lines until you start to pick up on subtle connections between the three characters, the shedding of the identities they once had and the surreal identities and existences they take on. The real villain of the book is pursued by dangerous Russians who he has stolen credit card numbers and large sums of money from, and another very angry individual who did three years in jail for being wrongfully accused of embezzling money from his employer. By the end of the book, the reader is not sure who is real and who is fake because what you assumed was a sequential timeline becomes very blurred. Chaon has the gift of giving his novel a thriller quality with haunting undertones that leaves his characters ghost-like.

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“Your house’s emblem should not be the white rose but the old sign of eternity . . . the snake which eats itself. The sons of York will destroy each other, one brother destroying another, uncles devouring nephews, fathers beheading sons. They are a house which has to have blood, and they will shed their own if they have no other enemy.” So it was said of the House of York, whose family crest bore the white rose, waging war against their cousins, the House of Lancaster of the red rose, for the crown of England. So it was said of the War of the Roses.

And at the center of the storm was a commoner, whose mother was born of royalty, Elizabeth Woodville. She was a woman of extraordinary beauty, rumored to be a sorceress, who supposedly cast a spell over young King Edward IV to become his wife and Queen of England. While her husband constantly took up arms to defend his crown to usurper cousins from the North, Elizabeth rose to the demands of her lofty position, promoting the fortunes and advancement of her ambitious relatives. But the prediction of the snake which eats itself became true as rivalry between the Yorks and the Lancasters never was laid to rest. Violence, betrayal and murder dominated Elizabeth’s life as Queen of England, passionate wife of Edward IV and devoted mother of their children.

Elizabeth and Edward IV had seven children, five daughters and two sons. The oldest son, Edward V, was never crowned King of England after his father’s sudden death. He and his brother Richard were imprisoned in the Tower of London by their uncle, the youngest York brother, Richard. In one broad stoke of blind ambition, he declared the children of Elizabeth and Edward IV illegitimate and declared himself King Richard III. The fate of the two young princes has confounded British historians for centuries. But Philippa Gregory, master historian and storyteller, puts her own unique spin on this royal mystery, thus setting up the storyline for the next book in this new Plantagenet’s series, “The Cousins’ War.”

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On July 16, 1942, thousands of Jewish families who were Paris residents were rounded up by French police. They were locked up in the Velodrome d’Hiver, an indoor stadium, for several days under appallingly inhuman conditions. From there, they were sent to Auschwitz where they were gassed. Ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski and her parents were one of those families. With the police pounding on their door in the middle of the night, Sarah was desperate to save her little brother.  So she locked him in a bedroom cupboard and promised to return for him.

Sarah’s story intertwines with that of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in Paris in 2002, who is investigating the 1942 roundup at “Vel d’Hive.” Julia’s research leads her to a trail of long-hidden family secrets that link her to Sarah, compelling her to delve deeper to find out what happened to Sarah. Probing into Sarah’s past adds some serious uncertainties to her own future, causing Julia to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.

Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a vivid and compelling snapshot of France under occupation and reveals painful details that surround this episode in France’s history.

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The setting is the Mississippi Delta, post – WWII. Laura McAllan has had to leave the mannerly, gentile life in which she was raised to move to a miserable, primitive, “mudbound” cotton farm her land-loving husband has purchased in the Mississippi Delta. Not only does she have to endure these primitive, brutal living conditions, but her mean-spirited, nasty, Ku Klux Klan card-carrying member of a father-in-law has also moved in with them. The only bright spots in Laura’s life are her two daughters, and her charming, handsome, but troubled brother-in-law Jamie who has recently returned from the war.

This is also the story of the Jackson family, sharecroppers on the McAllan farm. The Jackson’s oldest son, Ronsel, has also just returned from the war in Europe. In spite of Ronsel’s bravery in defending his country, he is still considered an inferior black man in the “Jim Crow South.” In an effort to try to come to terms with the horrible memories of combat, Ronsel and Jamie McAllan form an unlikely and forbidden friendship. It is this friendship that is at the heart of the book, inviting catastrophe from those KKK members who live in the nearby town.

The story is well-constructed and convincingly narrated by the men and women from the two families. The reader sees the story from all sides as well as the hardship of life in 1940’s Mississippi and the terror of racism at that time.

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This is not just another book about the Japanese American internment in 1942 to War Relocation camps. Jamie Ford tells this heartfelt story from the point of view of young Henry Lee, a 13-year-old Chinese boy, and Keiko Okabe, an adolescent Japanese/American girl who are the only non-whites in an exclusive prep school in Seattle. The book delves deeply into the close friendship of the two teenagers and the bullying they have to endure at their school, their unique and very different relationships they have with their fathers, and their forced separation when Keiko and her family are sent to an internment camp.

Alternating between the story of young Henry and Keiko is the adult perspective in 1986 of middle-aged Henry who has just lost his wife to cancer. In the opening pages, Henry comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, a National Historic Landmark in Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of several Japanese families, left in the hotel basement when they were sent to the internment camps. Henry investigates the suitcases himself and finds Keiko’s sketchbooks and her parasol covered with 40 years of dust. This discovery forces Henry to try to come to terms with the actions of his Chinese nationalist father, and decisions that he himself made decades ago with regard to Keiko.

This is Ford’s first novel, and it’s a great first effort. Jamie Ford is the great-grandson of a Chinese mining pioneer, and grew up near Seattle’s Chinatown. He gives us an intimate look at a very ugly period of U.S. history, when Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor caused such widespread panic and hatred that the president himself rubber-stamped the authorization of the internment camps. 62% of those sent to the camps were U.S. citizens.