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.

Review: HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY by Audrey Niffenegger

As an unabashed fan of TheTime Traveler’s Wife, Niffenegger’s startling and original first novel, I was keen to read Her Fearful Symmetry, particularly having heard that the setting includes London’s Highgate Cemetery, where Niffenegger is a tour guide. London, cemeteries, AN’s imagination—how could such a book go wrong?

But I confess myself disappointed, as a certain dark wizard was once heard to say. The further I read, the more I uncovered elements that should’ve intrigued me—two sets of twins; a haunting; a dark family secret. But none of these elements excited me as they should, or at least not for a long while. Julia and Valentina are the 21-year-old twins who are named as the heir to their aunt’s estate—a considerable sum of money along with her London flat. Their dead aunt is their mother’s estranged twin, and the younger twins have never met her. So why does she leave them everything, stipulating that their parents never set foot in the flat? The twins puzzle over this as they pack up and move to London, having nothing better to do, even while Valentina longs to get a college degree. Her domineering sister has no interest in this idea, and the twins seem fated to do everything together.

It’s Valentina’s growing need for independence from Julia that fuels the story. Valentina would like to get a life of her own—marry, have children, have a career, but Julia is too selfish to allow Valentina any room to breathe (in fact, Valentina is asthmatic, not coincidentally). While this is an interesting conflict, the twins themselves are boring. For two thirds of the book, they lead a dull London life hanging around the flat and watching TV.  They eventually meet their flat neighbors: Robert, their dead aunt’s grieving boyfriend; and Martin, whose wife has recently left him after enduring twenty-odd years of his obsessive-compulsive disorder. The two men are far more interesting than the vapid twins, and even the dead aunt, who haunts the London flat, seems more lively than the girls.

So I slogged half-heartedly through most of the book in the hopes that it would improve and because, however it pales beside TTW, it’s still well written. Then the action abruptly picked up and I sped through the last 150 pages. Suddenly Robert and Martin emerged from their funks, the twins actually started doing something, and dead aunt Elspeth was helping to engineer a bizarre plan.  Some Amazon.com reviewers thought the characters acted—well—out of character in the last third of the book, and I agree. Some character details are revealed too late for me to quite believe them; other actions just don’t make sense. The very end of the book comes abruptly and seems just tacked on. But at least I was awake and glued to the page for those last dozen chapters.

Recommended? I’ll put it this way: I would much rather have checked this book out from the library than have requested it as a gift. Now I’m stuck with this hardback book that feels a bit extravagant for what it’s given me.

Review: THE ZOOKEEPER'S WIFE

The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


During World War II, few cities were as horrific to live in as Warsaw. Seized by the Nazis in 1939, abandoned by their allies, Poland saw its capital turn overnight from a vibrant, cultural city of mixed population—30 percent were of Jewish descent—into a nightmare of German occupation. Yes, Paris and Amsterdam were occupied; London was blitzed. But Warsaw bled like no other. Its very spirit was crushed, its Jewish population herded into the ghetto, packed seven to a room. Nazi soldiers massacred their children, humiliated their elders, and eventually shipped hundreds of thousands to labor and concentration camps. These days, according to a recent Wikipedia article, Jews number about 1,000 in all of Poland, having been nearly eradicated from that country.

But horror of this magnitude produces heroism of equal magnitude, and herein lies the story of Antonina and Jan Zabinski, zookeepers who used their gutted enclosures to hide more than 300 Jews and helped transport them to safe havens outside of Warsaw. An active member of the Underground, Jan helped arrange for false identification papers, smuggled people out of the ghetto, and performed various acts of sabotage against the German occupiers. Meanwhile, Antonina maintained her household of revolving “Guests” and worked to keep up the spirits of her young son, who saw friends both animal and human fall victim to Hitler’s siege.

Diane Ackerman has done a remarkable job of recreating Antonina’s world from her memoirs, interviews, and other research. Each chapter details a pocket of this strange life, from brave characters to unusual friendships. From the terrifying initial capture of Warsaw to the horrors of the ghetto and at last the retreat of the German army, this story follows lives so closely that the reader feels she is looking over Antonina’s shoulder as she anxiously awaits her husband’s return each day. With taut, suspenseful, yet lyrical prose, Ackerman brings their situation to life even more vividly than the eight pages of photographs included.

As in Tatiana de Rosnay’s novel Sarah's Key, readers of The Zookeeper’s Wife know how the story ends. In fact, the story is so familiar to some of us that we forget these were real people, leading real day to day lives without knowing when, or if, the end was coming. These were people who risked their lives—their son—every day because they couldn’t see living any other way. One method of coping was to carry cyanide capsules always in their pockets. Death was that close.

While this tale will be difficult for those of us who have grown complacent and comfortable, it is vital to remember that we always have alternatives to permitting the impermissible. These stories remind us that even when the worst of humanity triumphs, the best of humanity is always waiting underneath, quietly simmering, not to be denied. By one estimate, some 20,000 Jews hid outside the ghetto in the city of Warsaw. Without the network of grocers, forgers, saboteurs, housekeepers, teachers, beauty salon owners, and others, those 20,000 people would have joined the rest of Jewish Warsaw at Treblinka. These are stories meant to uplift, but more than that, they should shame us into action. None of us is too weak to stand up to tyranny.