From the New Shelf

Sunflowers
Sheramy Bundrick

In a knockout debut novel, art historian Bundrick (Music and Image in Classical Athens) brings Vincent Van Gogh's paintings and personal story to vibrant life. While Bundrick takes many liberties (recorded in an author's note) in her fictionalized account of Van Gogh's affair with her narrator, fille de maison Rachel Courteau, she gives Rachel such a believable voice that the proceedings seem genuine. At 35, Van Gogh meets lovable spitfire Rachel while surreptitiously sketching her in a garden. Having taken refuge in an Aries brothel after the death of her parents, Rachel greets Van Gogh as a customer not long after, and soon feelings blossom between them. Visiting friend Paul Gauguin and the cloud of Van Gogh's madness undercut the couple's bliss, as do financial troubles and Rachel's life at the maison, where she's kept a virtual prisoner. While infusing well-known historical moments (like Van Gogh's infamous self-mutilation) with vivid details, humanizing Van Gogh and putting his famous works in context, Bundrick generates an impressive volume of suspense, delight and heartbreak. Publishers Weekly Review; August 2009.

The Wildwater Walking Club
Claire Cook

The rest of your life starts with one step. Noreen Kelly learns this the hard way when she takes a buyout offer at her small shoe company and wakes up the day after--jobless, dumped by her slick co-worker, and wondering who she is and what she wants. She becomes tentative friends with Tess and Rosie, and together the women form a walking club, each step bringing them closer together and closer to the life solutions they all seek. Cook creates likable female characters with realistic flaws. The plots are marked with Gilmore Girls-type dialogue and settings, utterly charming from beginning to end. There's plenty of laughs, anger, sorrow, and rage to keep the story moving along at a breezy pace; and all the subplots involving the multigenerational characters and their kooky suburban antics are tied up nicely. There's a little more edge here than in a typical "gentle" novel, but more softness than in an edgy "hen-lit" novel. Miss Julia would be proud to be friends with these women.
Booklist Review; April 2009.

The Last Bridge
Teri Coyne

Coyne's compelling debut shines an unnerving light on the fallout from a childhood rooted in abuse. Alexandra "Cat" Rucker, an alcoholic strip club cocktail waitress, returns to her childhood home after her mother kills herself. She's been gone 10 years and is now uncomfortable around her brother, Jared, and sister, Wendy; while confronting her past, she also tries to discern the meaning of her mother's suicide note: "He isn't who you think he is." Alternating between the complicated present and the horrific past, Coyne portrays the myriad ways family members cope with abuse. Cat's mother lived in a world of her own; Cat, the oldest, bore the brunt of her father's attacks; Jared buried himself in school sports, occasionally coming to his sister's defense when it was safe to do so; and Wendy focused on being the perfect daughter. Then there's Addison Watkins, the son of a family friend who at once offered a haven and a challenge to teenage Cat. Though the occasional one-liners distract rather than enhance, Coyne's prose effortlessly carries the reader through a thorny history and into possible redemption.
Publishers Weekly Review; March 2009.

Once on a Moonless Night
Dai Sijie

The spell cast by Dai Sijie's novels, beginning with his bestselling Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2001), is attributable, in part, to his work as a filmmaker (his fiction is strikingly visual) and his bicultural and bilingual experiences. Sijie left China for France at age 30 in 1984. The unnamed narrator in his third bewitching novel, a French college student, makes the reverse trip. Inspired by Paul D'Ampere, a gifted French linguist who retraced the steps of Marco Polo and then disappeared, she goes to Peking to study Chinese in 1978, learns about a long-missing ancient Buddhist scroll, and falls in love with Tumchooq, who is named after "the language in which Buddha preached." Tumchooq's connection to D'Ampere and the lost Buddhist sutra is slowly revealed within a finely embroidered sequence of flashbacks and testimonies. As impressionistically historical as it is imaginative, Dai's dreamlike tale of epic quests and love put to the test is exquisitely structured to illuminate "Hell, the earthly world, and Paradise" within the Forbidden City, a Chinese prison camp, Paris, Mali, and Burma. Sijie's dazzling and magical saga intimates that language is transcendent; books are precious; translation is a noble art; stories are the key to freedom; and truth prevails.
Booklist Review; September 2009.

Season of Water and Ice
Donald Lystra

Named by the Library of Michigan as a Michigan Notable Book for 2010, SEASON OF WATER AND ICE is the unforgettable story of two young people confronting life during a tumultuous few months of 1957. In quiet but searing prose it explores the enduring issues of love and family, the destructive forces to which these ideals are exposed, and the healing powers which can restore them. Danny DeWitt, aged fourteen, lives with his father in a rural area of northern Michigan following the family's abrupt move from the city and the unexplained departure of his mother. Bookish and friendless--and wanting to "stand at the side of things for a while"--Danny becomes acquainted with Amber Dwyer, a pregnant teenager abandoned by her boyfriend and rejected by her family and community. Both outsiders--one by choice, the other because of social stigma--Danny and Amber form an unusual, openhearted alliance which helps each to deal with their separate challenge. Amber must build a life for herself in the face of intolerance, and Danny must come to terms with his mother's rejection and his father's growing isolation. The friendship is tested when Amber's abusive boyfriend returns and Danny's mother draws further away, leading to a crisis which threatens Amber and her unborn child, as well as Danny's conception of love and manhood. Reflecting the political and social climate of the 1950s, Season of Water and Ice is underscored by themes of independence and obligation, love and sexuality, courage and surrender. This realistic work will appeal to both adult and young adult readers.
Book Description

Little Bird of Heaven
Joyce Carol Oates

Oates once again takes us to deteriorating upstate New York, this time the city of Sparta, where, as in We Were the Mulvanys, a tragic incident has devastating effects on two families. When Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, suspicion falls on husband Delray and on lover Eddy Diehl. Neither man is arrested, but each is forced to live under a veil of continued suspicion. In this story, it's the children who suffer the most, and they also narrate: first Eddy's daughter Krista and then Delray's son Aaron. Eddy separates from his wife and family and leaves Sparta, but Krista believes in her father's innocence, recounting life before and after the crime and offering her recollections of Zoe. Aaron recounts finding his mother's body and the bitterness of living with such notoriety. In typical Oates irony, Krista develops a crush on Aaron, climaxing in a deeply emotional scene; 15 years later they find out who killed Zoe. Readers will find the psychological suspense combined with tragedy and redemption a good read.
Library Journal Review; September 2009.

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

A novel and a book of stories in Petrushevskaya's exceptionally bleak realist mode have been published in the U.S., but she remains obscure here, whereas, her translators say, she is the best-known living writer in Russia. Her fantasies play out in the same totalitarian atmosphere of scarcity, suspicion, hopeless ness, and fear as does her realist fiction. The purely descriptive subtitle calls them all fairy tales, but according to the titles of the four sections into which they're sorted, they're "Songs of the Eastern Stars," "Allegories," "Requiems," and finally, "Fairy Tales" and if it's true that those in the final group contain the most supernatural events, there are plenty of inexplicable things in the others (quite often, the dead return bodily to their loved ones). All are told as if by a plain tale-teller, whether in first or third person: that is, directly, specifically, and concretely, without explicit interpretation. Sometimes, the density of action and the fact that characters are called only by first names, sobriquets, or functions (the father, the doctor, etc.) obscure the personae and encourage thinking of them as Everymen, Everywomen, and Everychildren, not singular personalities. If most of the stories end sadly, some at least suggest that better things may come. The auras of Samuel Beckett and the baleful Albanian magic realist Ismail Kadare blend in Petrushevskaya's work.
Booklist Review; October 2009.

The Tourist
Olen Steinhauer

Superbly accomplished at both plotting and characterization, Steinhauer, in a change of pace from his series of Eastern European thrillers (e.g., The Bridge of Sights; Victory Square), offers an emotionally damaged protagonist who is an experienced spy or "tourist" but now a family man and desk-bound agent of the post-9/11, scandal-ridden CIA. When Milo Weaver is called back to fieldwork and assigned to capture an international assassin, it sets off an investigation into one of Milo's colleagues. The story is long and complicated but compelling and hard to put down. As is true of the better spy novels, the theme here is betrayal. Forays into blind alleys, puzzling clues, lapses of judgment, narrow escapes, and ingenious attainment of objectives establish Milo as a skilled operative performing difficult tasks while being systematically deceived by compatriots and adversaries. Accepting the contemporary story as potentially realistic, readers are led into hoping that their country's intelligence-gathering leadership is actually in better hands--and performing for less venal reasons--than the novel suggests. Appropriately, this story includes a full measure of cynicism, very little humor, and a tender conclusion.
Library Journal Review; November 2008.