A Mercy, by Toni Morrison

A Mercy by Toni Morrison

Fiction hardcover, 2008 Knopf

Nobel author

A seemingly short novel at 167 pages and narrated in lyrical language by several voices, A Mercy is in fact an intense and often internalized perspective on the effects of slavery on the human mind and heart. In colonial America of the late 1600s, life is harsh for most people and brutal for slaves. With disease, food shortages, and backbreaking work to contend with, the land is rugged and even the weather seems to conspire against you.

Our story centers around Florens, a young slave girl who been accepted reluctantly by a Dutch landowner to pay off a debt owed him. He was offered her mother but the slave mother begged him to take her daughter, thinking that Florens would have a better life with him than with her own brutal, rapist master. Viewpoint shifts as chapters are spoken in different voices, including those of Lina, an old Indian woman whose tribe has been wiped out by smallpox. Sorrow, a lone shipwreck survivor, Rebekka, the childless landowner's wife and Florens mother will all have their say here too. Each will speak in their own voice, something Morrison accomplishes better than most, revealing more about themselves than observation or simple narration could tell us.

Belonging is a strong thread throughout the story, being motherless and yearning for family and closeness, or being childless in the case of their mistress. Lina thinks of young Florens as "love-disabled" because of the way she tries to get close to her, and then to others, including a black freeman who rebuffs her for, among other things, having a slave mentality. There is so much here that the story seemed almost condensed to me. This is not a fast read for most, the story should be read slowly, the language is rich, almost dense at times, and needs to be savoured. But what a powerful story it is. And what it leads us to is the realization that what to some may seem like an act of mercy may in fact feel like an act of abandonment.

Posted by Sandra at Fresh Ink Books.

The Brass Verdict, by Michael Connelly

The "Lincoln Lawyer" returns. After a year's hiatus, during which time defense attorney Mickey Haller goes through rehab and stays straight, Haller is abruptly thrown back into the world of law when a fellow attorney is murdered. Haller takes over most of the cases, including the "franchise": a prominent film producer accused of murdering his wife and her lover.

In addition to having to get up to speed quickly, to sort out what is going on in each of the cases, Haller is concerned that his own life may be threatened. In part for this reason and in part because the murdered attorney had been his friend, Haller begrudgingly lets LAPD detective Harry Bosch in. Haller wants the murderer caught as much as Bosch does, but is limited by law in what he can do to help Bosch. Their alliance is an uneasy one but one that seems to develop into almost a mutual respect.

As is the case with other Connelly novels, this one is replete with the details, is exacting in getting them right. Thus we can step right into Haller's shoes and feel the pressure as he takes steps to reconstruct a calendar, to track down clients. We also can breathe with him as he resumes his habit of working out of his Lincoln Town cars (three of them, rotated), watching the Suitcase City pass by as he is driven from one appointment to another.

It was a pleasure to read a Mickey Haller novel in which Bosch figures so prominently. It gives us a different perspective on the sometimes-explosive man-on-a-mission. It was also a pleasure to get to know Haller better, to follow his efforts to get back into the real world and perhaps to take steps to win his ex-wife back.

Away, by Amy Bloom

An extraordinary book. Small and simply written, this tale of Lilian Leyb is also poetic, beautiful, and full of characters we can believe in even as we laugh at their unexpected actions. Most of all, the character of Lillian is solid, strong, far from perfect yet yes, perfect.

Lillian finds herself in Manhattan with nothing but an address pinned to her coat. She speaks no English but does speak Russian and Yiddish and lands in New York in 1924, during the period when to be a seamstress means you can live. She has already been through hell in Russia, losing her family to horrific violence. Perhaps the lessons of that time are part of what keeps her going, adjusting to turns of events and accepting what she must accept, yet single-mindedly doing what she herself knows she must do.

Eventually Lillian sets out to return to Russia to find her little daughter, and her route takes her across the country and up through Canada and beyond. On this "road trip" unlike any other road trip she meets many people, as important as those she left behind in Russia and New York. Each time Lillian sets off again we learn the future, sketched lovingly, of each of these friends, a bonus that usually made me smile.

The details of Lillian's life in New York, her trip across country, her walk into the Yukon, are alive with a sense of reality. We can walk in her shoes even though for us it doesn't hurt.

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell loves studies and statistics. He hunts down the lesser-known and bends them to his will - in a good way!

In this book, Gladwell takes on the myth of the self-made man (or woman). He treks down various roads: the roads of birth dates, birth years, cultural backgrounds, and especially the road of opportunities. He finds connections between these elements and the potential for success in different fields. He shows how in hockey and several other sports, the month of birth is critical to the person's access to special opportunities that can lead to success. He follows airline pilots in different countries and shows how the cultural background of each can affect the number of accidents involving the pilots.

He takes us to the life of 13-year-old Bill Gates and shows how Gates was uniquely positioned to reach the pinnacle of power he now has.

In essence, he shows us how individual success is actually the success of a community, of circumstance, of the luck of birth far more than it is of a person simply working hard - but notes that working hard is always at the heart of it nevertheless.

What's more important is that when we understand these elements we can effect changes so that these opportunities are available to a greater number of persons. We might even find hints here for the raising of our children.

What The Dead Know - Wendy's Review

He sat you down, looked straight into your eyes, and told you that families didn’t work that way. A family was a team, a unit, a country unto itself, the one part of her identity that would remain constant the rest of her life. “We lock our front door against strangers,” he said, “but never against each other.” – from What The Dead Know, page 3 -

The Bethany sisters, Heather aged eleven and Sunny aged fifteen, take a trip to the mall one day and are never seen again. The investigation into their disappearance goes cold, and their parents try to move on with their lives – one never accepts the children will not be found, the other is convinced they are dead. Then thirty years later a car loses control on a highway near Baltimore and the driver leaves the scene. When she is located, she tells the police an amazing story - although she is driving a car registered to a Penelope Jackson, her real name (she claims) is Heather, the youngest Bethany sister. But her story seems unbelievable and her allegations don’t always square up with the facts.

In her latest novel, Laura Lippman uses flashbacks and multiple points of view to untangle the mystery of the missing girls. Her character development is excellent. Along with Miriam (the girls’ mother) and the young woman who calls herself Heather, Lippman engages the reader with a playboy cop named Kevin Infante (who is the lead detective in the case), a flashy lawyer named Gloria, Chet Willoughby (the retired detective still haunted by the case), and a book obsessed social worker named Kay. But it is the mystery itself which drives the story, and the plot weaves and twists and keeps the reader unbalanced. Lippman knows her way through a police investigation, and she knows how to turn up the heat on a cold case. What The Dead Know keeps the reader guessing until the end.

What The Dead Know is as much an exploration of the psyche of its characters as it is an unraveling of a mystery. Lippman reaches into the minds and motivations of every character and in doing so engages the reader in a psychological study of human behavior under extreme situations. This novel reminds me of Patricia Cornwell’s early work – sharply imagined, expertly written, and gripping. This is the first book I’ve read by Lippman, but I have added her to my must-read authors list. If you are looking for a superb mystery, look no further than What The Dead Know.

Highly recommended.

Breath by Tim Winton

You could summarize Tim Winton's Breath by saying it's a novel about a two Australian teenagers who perfect their surfing skills under the tutelage of a reclusive mentor. Of course, that would be like saying Fight Club is a novel about young men in an illicit fighting club.

Breath may be built around surfing but the story, told from the viewpoint of Bruce "Pikelet" Pike, is about what the title says -- breath, both as a life sustainer and as a metaphor. Pike's story focuses on his relationship with his best friend, Ivan "Loonie" Loon, and how Bill "Sando" Sanderson, a star surfer, takes them under his wing and becomes their guru to the dismay and resigned acceptance of Sanderson's wife, Eva. Breath serves to illustrate the routine of life and how the desire to challenge that routine can be, at the same time, exhilarating and dangerous to the point of deadly.

Within a moment of a newborn's first "rude shock of respiration," breathing becomes so routine we rarely give it another thought unless and until it is threatened. Thus, Pike wonders over the years whether the risks he took with Loonie, Sando and Eva "were anything more than a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath." While an adult might deplore risks they took when young, as a youth the sense is "that life renders you powerless by dragging you back to it, breath upon breath upon breath in an endless capitulation to biological routine, and that the human will to control is as much about asserting power over your own body as exercising it on others."

This portrayal of breath appears at the outset of the novel, years after the main events. It is also a focus of Pikelet and the appropriately nicknamed Loonie as they rebel against the mundaneness of their life in a small town in relatively remote western Australia. It starts with challenging each other to see who can dive and hold their breath for the longest period of time, often pushing themselves to the point of blacking out. Their feats produce exhilaration even though fraught with disaster.

Pike and Loonie also become enthralled with surfing and come to meet and know Sando, a former world class surfer who, with his wife, has become essentially a hippie recluse. Sando sees in them a capacity to take on surfing challenges above and beyond ordinary mortals. Thus, not only does he take these barely teenaged boys to surf in shark-haunted waters, he teaches them how to analyze where storms will produce the biggest swells and takes them miles into the ocean to challenge huge waves only he has surfed.

Loonie and Pikelet encounter similar as well as differing coming of age challenges, some of which they will exult over, others of which will scar them for life. Throughout the book, there is an undercurrent of walking the line between acceptable risk and disaster. Breath doesn't try to tell us where to find the appropriate ground among routine, challenge and jeopardy. Instead, breath becomes a vehicle by which to reflect upon adventure and addiction, courage and self-destruction.

So Brave, Young, and Handsome, by Lief Enger

This book became almost like an old friend to me. The chapters are short, so I could grab and gulp one down quickly in odd moments, and set it aside, feeling a sense of accomplishment. At the same time, of course, by picking up and letting down I didn't fully become engaged with the characters early. Or maybe it's just that kind of book: easy to read yet easy to set aside.

At least at first. The characters are intriguing, yet were difficult for me to get to know, especially the narrator, Monte Becket.

The story takes place around the turn of the century, in the early 1900s. Becket wrote an adventure novel that quickly became a best-seller, in spite of his lack of knowledge of the subject matter. He didn't know horses or adventure, yet his novel was about a western hero who triumphs over difficult odds by knowing how to ride, how to track, how to make love. The pulp fiction of the day.

Monte lives in Minnesota with his beautiful artist wife and observant young son. After the success of his novel he quits his job at the post office and tries to make a living at writing, yet he can no longer seem to find the words. Thus, he is feeling like a failure when a neighbor, Glendon Dobie, suggests he join him on a trip to Mexico to find the wife he left behind decades before. The neighbor is a bit of an unknown, but has found a way into the hearts of Monte's family, so Monte's wife urges him to go.

And thus begins an adventure for real. The trip doesn't go as planned in almost every way. Monte finds himself in situations that might have made good novel fodder if he'd been so inclined to use it. He is also challenged to find out more about himself, as so often happens in road stories.

I did not particularly like Monte until nearly the middle of the book. I didn't get a good feel for him, it seemed I couldn't grasp his essence, and what I did grasp I didn't particularly like. Yet by that time, the middle of the book, he began to change, or he began to assert those qualities of his that perhaps his wife knew and he had forgotten. From there on his decisions seem to be more outward - for the benefit of others - than internal.

Through much of the book, Monte and Glendon are pitted against a former Pinkerton's detective, bounty hunter Charles Siringo. As the novel progresses, Siringo assumes more and more presence and becomes almost a super-human adversary, seemingly evil to the core, yet...not?

Interesting, complex characters. A road show that almost assumes epic proportions. A story of a kind of redemption, finally, for more than one character.