Posted in 7-2014 Reviews, Literary on May 31st, 2014
From the moment one arrives at Book Expo America until the moment one leaves, flush with the pleasure of meeting authors, publishers, and fellow book lovers; with head ringing from sensory overload from the color, noise, activity, and sheer volume of books to look at; and with shoulders aching from carrying too many impossible-to-resist literary giveaways, a BEA attendee will fully understand what it feels like to experience “book heaven.” For a few days each year, the Javits Center in New York City is a showcase for the book industry, a place where librarians, book sellers, teachers, writers, editors, bloggers, critics, and the press can preview books that will be released in the next few months, attend author breakfasts and chats, line up for book signings, obtain free review copies, and learn more about the book industry. Thousands of “book professionals” this year met with publishers and authors on Thursday, May 29, and Friday, May 30. For those who are not “book professionals” but who may also want to attend a BEA exhibition, there is no problem anymore, thanks to a new BEA feature which debuted today, Saturday, May 31. “Book Con,” modeled on the wildly popular Comic Con fan conventions held in numerous cities throughout the world, now opens the BEA exhibition hall to any book lover who wants to attend for the last day of the Expo. Click the full article to see which books garnered a lot of publicity at BEA this year.
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Author Amanda Michalopoulous develops her novel from the point of view of Maria Papamavrou, who is nine in the late 1970s, after the military dictatorship in Greece has ended; in her twenties in the 1990s; and in her mid-thirties in the early twenty-first century, and the novel shifts back and forth among these three time periods. When the novel first opens, Maria, now a thirty-five-year-old teacher in an elementary school, is confronting a difficult little girl who has just moved to Athens from Paris. Reminded of her own difficult past, Maria then reminisces about own life when she was a similar age as her new student. Maria arrives in Athens as a nine-year-old from Nigeria, where her father has been working. Her first days of school, filled with humorous detail, endear her to the reader immediately, as she gets into a fight with another student, deals with another who wants to know if a lion ate the missing part of her little finger, and what “fart on my balls” means. The arrival of Anna Horn, another new student, is the highpoint of her life, however, and when the imperious Anna rudely corrects the teacher, announcing that “We’re not immigrants, we’re dissidents,” Maria feels as if she has found a best friend – until Anna declares that “there are no dissidents in Africa. My mother says you’re racists who exploit black people.” Despite this inauspicious beginning, Anna and Maria become best friends for life – sort of.
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From September, 1829, until early 1831, the British government overseeing the rule of Tasmania as part of its Australian colony, engaged in establishing the shameful “Black Line,” part of its Black War to remove all blacks in Tasmania. Numerous clans of aborigines, who hunted and farmed “their” Tasmanian lands at will for uncounted generations learned to hate the whites who appropriated their lands at will, destroyed their farms and habitat, and killed them and their families to take over their traditional lands. Rohan Wilson, a Tasmanian himself, tells the brutal story of the Black Line in the northeast part of Tasmania, in which a white farmer, John Batman, and Manalargena, an aborigine leader, among others, engage in a genocide sanctioned by Colonial Governor George Arthur on behalf of the British crown. As Wilson presents the bloody story of this period, he is sensitive to the historical record, telling of events as they happened, while also paying attention to the incalculable effects of this war on the aborigine people, either through warfare or through the transporting of the few survivors of this war to mainland Australia. His main characters are real and are presented realistically, not as stereotypes of good and evil as they struggle to survive.
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Author Bohumil Hrabal, a captivating story-teller whom many consider the Czech Republic’s best novelist, brings to life the real town in which he lived for many years. The castle in this novel, once the home of Count Spork, just outside “the little town where time stood still,” is now a retirement home, residence of elderly pensioners given much freedom to lead comfortable lives, along with a number of old pensioners who need kindly delivered terminal care. “Rediffusion boxes” playing “Harlequin’s Millions” are on the walls everywhere, both inside and outside the castle, and everyone who hears this tune is “entranced” by its “melancholy memory of old times.” The unnamed speaker, the wife of the former owner of a brewery, her husband Francin, and his older brother “Uncle Pepin,” have come to the castle as residents late in life, after losing their brewery when the communists took over in the aftermath of World War II. The speaker, for thirty years an independent and beautiful local actress, has felt at home among the wealthiest residents of their community, but though she is now elderly, toothless, and poor, that changed condition barely fazes her. Still independent in spirit, she embraces her new surroundings, explores them with enthusiasm, and enjoys hearing the stories of other residents at the castle and the history of their much earlier predecessors from as long ago as the seventeenth century. Superb! (This book is #1 on my list of Favorites for the year so far.)
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Norwegian author Jo Nesbo never writes the same book twice, even within his best-selling series of ten Harry Hole thrillers. From The Redbreast, an historical novel which examines Norway’s Nazi era past and its neo-Nazi present, to The Snowman, a horror novel which out-horrors Stephen King, and The Leopard, with action which moves from Norway to Hong Kong and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nesbo always keeps the narrative moving at a ferocious pace, and the excitement at fever pitch. Though the reader does come to know Harry Hole and those who share his life to some extent during these ten novels, the emphasis has always been on action and thrills. Harry, an alcoholic loner at heart, has never been complex. Nesbo’s focus changes with The Son, a standalone novel. Though the plot here is every bit as fast-paced as those of Nesbo’s Harry Hole novels, the scope is smaller and more intimate, and for the first time, Nesbo seems to be allowing the reader inside his characters, making his characters and themes more complex and fully-developed. I loved it.
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