Review: LIFE OF PI by Yann Martel

Contemporary fiction

Harcourt Brace, 2001

326 pages  $16.00 

Sixteen-year-old Pi Patel, son of a zookeeper, is a boy of faith. He has embraced three religions—Catholicism, Islam, and Hindu—to the bewilderment of his secular family. The early part of his story concerns his search for faith; the latter part concerns a test of that faith.

When political upheaval urges Pi’s father to move the family from their native India to Canada, the story reaches its heart—and ours. The family’s shipboard passage is initially a sort of Noah’s ark adventure as the Patels transport their zoo animals to North America. But the adventure becomes desperate when Pi finds himself the sole human survivor in a lifeboat he shares with a Bengal tiger.

Here the Noah parallels end. While Martel suffuses the book with humor and wild, magical touches, this is no Disney tale of a boy and his tiger becoming best friends. Instead he explores how two species learn to survive together despite the fact that one is predator and the other, potential prey.

The book’s structure seems to allow for few surprises. Pi survives; this we know from the start. Though told in Pi’s “voice,” the book is based on a journalist’s interview of the adult Pi, years after the shipwreck. Yet like all great stories, the tension comes in the telling, not in the outcome. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever watched Hitchcock’s Rear Window for the fifth time and still can’t help hiding your eyes. It is in the how of the survival that keeps us riveted: How will Pi feed himself? How will he feed the Bengal tiger without becoming the main course? How long will they be at sea, and will either suffer some grave and irrevocable damage? And, as the story becomes ever stranger and unbelievable, we begin to wonder: What’s really up with Pi?

Some reviewers have compared Martel’s book to Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea—the same singular purpose, the same lonely pursuit of the goal, the ever-present sea always the enemy. But in fact, Martel’s book is not only longer, it’s much more compelling. Hemingway presumed a fascination with his topic that the reader may not share; Martel grabs his readers by the lapels and compels them to look at and live this fascinating story. We can’t tear ourselves away from resourceful Pi, who, though faithful, is never passive. Instead he becomes the protector, even the god, of the small world within his control. Thus a religious sensibility never overwhelms the story, but rather breathes as the fabric and weave of every word.

This is a story to read and savor. It’s that rare sort of book that you race through to find out what happens, only to be disappointed that you’ve run out of pages. When I had nearly finished reading my library copy, I was sorely tempted to buy the book just to have it on my shelf as a kind of constant friend. I settled for buying it as a gift for someone else.

Review: GOING BOVINE by Libba Bray

YA fiction

Delacorte Press, 2009

480 pages  $17.99

Oh, readers and writers, wouldn't we all love to be as clever as Libba Bray? How about we all just sit down at our desks and hammer out original, smart, wacky, poignant, lovely stories? She makes it look so easy, I'm tempted to think that I too could do it.

Her 2009 novel Going Bovine begins with a pretty out-there premise: A 16-year-old hero who is a bit lazy, uninterested in his own life, and unmotivated to do much of anything, suddenly finds out he's got no time to waste. He's got mad cow disease, and his only chance of curing it (and, oh yeah, saving the world) involves going on a complicated quest accompanied by an impromptu dwarf sidekick, a punk-rock angel, and a yard gnome/Norse god.

Oh, sorry--did you already come up with that plot? Chuck it. You won't write it as well as Bray did. It's hard to know what to say about this tale, beyond listing its many endearing qualities: funny as hell, unexpected, fantastically imagined. And it's just as important to note what it's not: overwrought, sentimental, preachy. The internal journey of our heroes is as important as their cross-country trek, and yet somehow we don't feel like we're being told anything--we readers are just along for Libba Bray's crazy funhouse ride. And then just when you've settled back and are thinking this is nothing more than a kind of goofy frathouse-type prank, some little truth manages to bite you in the butt. This book is a little bit Douglas Adams, kind of like Don Quixote, and sort of similar to nothing else you've read. Yes, it's marketed as a young adult title, but it's so much more than that. It's science mixed with fantasy mixed with that always-terrifying real world we all try to escape from.

So read it already. Four stars.

Review: IN THE WOODS by Tana French

Mystery/Suspense

Penguin, 2008

464 pages  $15.00

I reviewed Lisa Unger's BeautifulLies last month and gave it a half-hearted "fun summer read" rating. But if you really want to lose yourself in a summer crime story, put Tana French's first novel, In the Woods, on the top of your nightstand stack.

The premise is intriguing enough: The only surviving victim of an old unsolved case of missing children has grown up and become a detective. Once a carefree twelve-year-old in the suburbs of Dublin, now-Detective Rob Ryan has joined the Murder Squad and has only one real friend: his partner, Cassie Maddox. When Ryan and Maddox are assigned to a murder case involving a twelve-year-old ballet student from Ryan's hometown of Knocknaree, Ryan's memories start to return: The dense wood that was his childhood playground; his two best friends; the day the police found him catatonic and covered in blood, able to offer no memory of what had happened to his playmates, who were never seen again.

It seems Ryan has two mysteries to solve--who murdered young Katy Devlin and who robbed him of his own childhood twenty years ago? And could the two cases be related? And we're off and running.

One thing that makes Tana French's book such a great lose-yourself read is that the tension never dials down to a quiet hum. Despite being very much a police procedural--you get it all, investigation techniques, police banter, the blustering supervisor--the story is as much about Ryan's injured psyche and his relationship with Maddox as it is about the mystery. Each of the three stories--Katy's investigation, Ryan's memories, and his changing partnership--keeps its own thread of suspense taut throughout a surprisingly long novel. Told completely from Ryan's viewpoint, the book moves along, prodded by a complex, flawed narrator.

The prose style is elegant without being flowery, the pacing solid, the ending satisfying--or, at least, real. If you enjoy a good mystery, great characters, and late nights of annoying your significant other by keeping the reading light on, pick up In the Woods. You won't be sorry.

Looking Back

What is backstory? How important is it to your writing?

The key word is back, friends. As in background. As in, “who cares?”

Well, you the writer care a great deal. But the reader may not.

Today I’ve been writing a lot of backstory. I love fantasy, especially children’s fantasy—both reading it and writing it. After many years of writing other kinds of books, I’m now finally getting back to writing a fantasy. It’s a pentalogy (five-part series), and that makes for some issues—specifically, plot issues. So I’m writing backstory. It’s not really for the reader, but for me, the writer. I have to know the background of my characters and their world(s), the politics, the balance of power. This may all come out to some degree for readers too, but to start with, I’ve got to understand it.

The trick is not to overwhelm your reader with backstory. Write it out, make it as detailed as you like, get it out of your writing system. Then enter your characters’ world. They know the backstory; they’ve lived it. You want to write from their viewpoint, as one who knows it. Then judiciously feed the reader details as needed, like seasoning spaghetti sauce. Luckily, if you oversalt (or overbasil, overoregano) it, you can cut. The Xacto knife is the writer’s greatest tool.

Review: LITTLE BEE by Chris Cleave

Contemporary Fiction

Simon & Schuster, 2009

271 pages  $15.00 

Once, not so very long ago, there was a Borders Express near my house--a tiny Borders store with the nicest clerks, so homey you forgot it was a link in a very long chain of Borders stores. I was buying two other books, and Little Bee sat on display at the checkout. The clerk saw my interest and gushed about how "everyone" loved the book, and "no one" would spoil it by saying too much about it.

So I'm a sucker for hand-selling. I bought it.

I don't believe in telling much about a book (or a movie, for that matter) anyway, whether it's Little Bee or not. The wonderful feeling of cracking the spine of a new book and not knowing what world you're stepping into is too often spoiled by the instant tweets and chirps of pundits. That said, I think it's perfectly okay to reveal that Little Bee is about the friendship between two women of very different worlds. One is a Nigerian refugee; one is a London magazine editor. How their lives come together, the choices they make, the bond they share--these are things that you can discover as you read.

It's a compelling story, one you'll be loathe to put down, partly because of its unforgettable characters and partly because Chris Cleave does such deft work of telling their story. In only 266 pages you understand these women and the men, both young and adult, who inhabit their lives. It's not a sweeping, vast family drama; it's a small story, but also a very big story. Cleave gives the reader the microcosm of a much bigger picture, and we come away feeling like we get it at last.

Little Bee is a great novel for any writer to read as well. Study its pacing, its use of voice (you always know who's talking, whether or not you see the dialogue tag), its attention to small details--the feel of sand between your toes, the green pastures of southern England, the taste of hot tea. They mean different things to different people. How do your characters respond differently to things that might seem like ordinary human experiences?

Read it. You won't be sorry.

Review: REBEL ANGELS by Libba Bray

Young Adult fantasy

Delacorte, 2006

548 pages  $16.95

About a month ago, I read Libba Bray’s debut novel, A Great and Terrible Beauty, which was Book One in this juicy Victorian fantasy trilogy. While Book One captured my imagination, Book Two--Rebel Angels--kicked the story into high gear and deepened the characters lives, both inside and outside their fantasy realm.

Heroine Gemma Doyle is a 16-year-old student at Spence Academy for Young Ladies in Victorian England. While Spence purports to prepare its charges for a life as proper young women of society, Gemma and her friends all hide shameful secrets—poverty, drug-addicted relatives, shattered families. Theirs is a life of propriety, structure, and social class, rules that choke them like the corsets they’re forced to wear. And that’s just in our world.

I love stories that straddle two worlds. Gemma Doyle may be the good schoolgirl by day, but she’s also the only hope for the Order, a secret society whose control of the magical Realms is crumbling. Evil forces are struggling to take power of the Realms and to break through to our world as well. Gemma, whose powers were conferred by her late mother in Book One, must bind the magic to calm the chaos of the Realms before the evil Circe beats her to it. It’s a tangled mystery of whom to trust and how to gather the power that is Gemma’s alone to wield.

The wonderful twists in the story come from the glimpses of Dickensian Christmas scenes, Bethlem Hospital (the madhouse), viscount’s sons and illicit loves. Terrors abound both in the Realms and in London Town—it’s up to the reader to decide which is more horrific. Author Libba Bray weaves the two worlds together with ease and develops Gemma and her friends into young ladies we care deeply about. Luckily, I can move right on to The Sweet Far Thing, the concluding book, as it was released in 2009.

Review: SKYLIGHT CONFESSIONS by Alice Hoffman

Years ago, I read my first Alice Hoffman novel—Turtle Moon (Putnam, 1992). Part thriller, part heartbreak, it was hauntingly, beautifully written. Every character was as real as my own mother, and every emotion expressed got under my skin. Since then, I’ve been a Hoffman fan.

Skylight Confessions may not quite reach TM’s level of perfection, but it certainly doesn’t disappoint. Hoffman belongs to that school called “magical realism.” Personally, I’m not fond of schools and labels, but it’s the sort of thing one mentions in a review. All it means here is that a vague, shimmery otherworld surrounds the harsh realities of the Hoffman world. A hint of a ghost or the footstep of a witch shouldn’t surprise a Hoffman reader, and in fact, in most of her stories, the “magic” doesn’t seem all that foreign to those of us who have seen death up close.

Here she tells the simple yet impossibly complex story of a lonely young woman, her marriage to the wrong man, the children she has, the life she completes. Easy, and yet not, because every simple family boils with confusion and deceit, even if they don’t, like this one, unveil real tragedy. Orphaned Arlyn, who marries too fast, with too much passion, is the heartbeat of the book. Even when she is not physically present, she bleeds through her determined daughter, her troubled son, her neglectful husband, her true love. This is not the happiest of stories, but it is beautifully told. We weep for the sinners as well as the sinned upon, because no one quite knows who he or she is, or how he or she is meant to act, until it is too late. Hoffman is a writer’s writer in the way she constructs characters and weaves them through the quiet desperation of ordinary lives.

If this book lacks some of the fervor of Hoffman’s earlier works, it may be that it is simply a quieter, more studied story. In any case, it will stay with you, as it has with me. No true fan will walk away disappointed.