While I’ll admit that my fascination with snow globes initially drew me to this book (how do they get the water in there? How?) the plot completes the one-two punch. Mathilda Savitch’s older sister is dead, and in order to bring her parents out of their grief-stricken stupor, she has decided to begin behaving badly–and digging into the mystery surrounding her sister’s murder. A coming-of-age story with a plucky narrator and an intriguing hook: how can you go wrong?
Here’s the publisher’s summary:
“I have a sister who died. Did I tell you this already? I did but you don’t remember, you didn’t understand the code . . . She died a year ago, but in my mind sometimes it’s five minutes. In the morning sometimes it hasn’t even happened yet. For a second I’m confused, but then it all comes back. It happens again.”
Fear doesn’t come naturally to Mathilda Savitch. She prefers to look right at the things nobody else can bring themselves to mention: for example, the fact that her beloved older sister is dead, pushed in front of a train by a man still on the loose. Her grief-stricken parents have basically been sleepwalking ever since, and it is Mathilda’s sworn mission to shock them back to life. Her strategy? Being bad..
Mathilda decides she’s going to figure out what lies behind the catastrophe. She starts sleuthing through her sister’smost secret possessions—e-mails, clothes, notebooks,whatever her determination and craftiness can ferret out. More troubling, she begins to apply some of her oldersister’s magical charisma and powers of seduction to the unraveling situations around her. In a storyline that thrums with hints of ancient myth, Mathilda has to risk a great deal—in fact, has to leave behind everything she loves—in order to discover the truth.
Mathilda Savitch bursts with unforgettably imagined details: impossible crushes, devastating humiliations, the way you can hate and love your family at the same moment, the times when you and your best friend are soweak with laughter that you can’t breathe. Startling, funny, touching, odd, truthful, page-turning, and, in the end, heartbreaking, Mathilda Savitch is an extraordinary debut. Once you make the acquaintance of Mathilda Savitch, you will never forget her.
Thanks to all who participated in last night’s discussion of Judy Blundell’s What I Saw and How I Lied. It was great to get so many different perspectives!
I hope to see you all at January’s discussion of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle — mark your calendars now: it’s scheduled for January 11th, at 6pm.
Some things that came up in last night’s discussion:
Some links to information about the Gold Train: there’s the PCHA (Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the US) report on the Gold Train; there’s a webpage dedicated to information about the Gold Train settlement; and of course, there’s a Wikipedia page as well.
Life As We Knew It and The Dead and the Gone, by Susan Beth Pfeffer — survival stories that’ll have you stockpiling food and chopping wood… just in case!
Ten Cents a Dance, by Christine Fletcher — this one that will let you experience an aspect of the 1940s that many people haven’t even heard of: taxi dancing. The atmosphere is so strong that you’ll hear, smell and see Ruby’s world. Highly recommended.
Last Days of Summer, by Steve Kluger — an epistolary novel set in the years leading up to and during the United State’s involvement in WWII. Hilarious and heartbreaking and sweet and again, hilarious, this is one I’ve read at least fifteen times.
The Green Glass Sea and White Sands, Red Menace, by Ellen Klages – a beautifully written pair of books that begin in 1943, with 11-year-old Dewey Kerrigan traveling to live with her father at Los Alamos, where he is one of the many people working on ”the gadget”.
As always, if you’d like to put any of these items on hold, stop by and see us, give us a call at 985.2173, or place the hold online at our catalog.
I’ve been meaning to read this one for ages. And now that it has two sequels, I really need to get on the ball!
From the flap:
Damaged Portland detective Archie Sheridan spent ten years tracking Gretchen Lowell, a beautiful serial killer, but in the end she was the one who caught him. Two years ago, Gretchen kidnapped Archie and tortured him for ten days, but instead of killing him, she mysteriously decided to let him go. She turned herself in, and now Gretchen has been locked away for the rest of her life, while Archie is in a prison of another kind—addicted to pain pills, unable to return to his old life, powerless to get those ten horrific days off his mind. Archie’s a different person, his estranged wife says, and he knows she’s right. He continues to visit Gretchen in prison once a week, saying that only he can get her to confess as to the whereabouts of more of her victims, but even he knows the truth—he can’t stay away.
When another killer begins snatching teenage girls off the streets of Portland, Archie has to pull himself together enough to lead the new task force investigating the murders. A hungry young newspaper reporter, Susan Ward, begins profiling Archie and the investigation, which sparks a deadly game between Archie, Susan, the new killer, and even Gretchen. They need to catch a killer, and maybe somehow then Archie can free himself from Gretchen, once and for all. Either way, Heartsick makes for one of the most extraordinary suspense debuts in recent memory.
If you’re in the mood for chick lit nestled in a cozy land of magical realism, When Autumn Leaves may be just the ticket. Author Amy S. Foster has created a fictional coastal town called Avening where the impossible is possible and a mystical sisterhood called the Jaen is losing their leader Autumn; the challenge is choosing a replacement from a bevy of interesting, complex female characters (hence the cute double-meaning title). The cover is glowing with warm autumnal shades of orange offset by a black latticework-like border of leaves, and the loveliness of the image suggests that the reader’s journey with one filled with vivid images and lyrical writing.
From the publisher’s summary:
In Avening, a tiny town on the Pacific coast, it’s hard not to believe in magic. This is a town where the shoes in the window always fit, where youcan buy a love potion at the corner shop, and where the woods at the outskirts of town just might be the door to another world. And, of course, there’s Autumn, Avening’s beloved resident witch. From what’s known of its mythical founding, Avening has always been a haven for people who are a little bit different, a place where they can come to discover what makesthem so special. When Autumn receives news that she’s been promoted to a higher coven, she also learns she has to replace herself. But who in Avening is in tune enough with her own personal magic to take over the huge responsibility of town witch? Autumn has a list of thirteen women and menwho just might have what it takes-but how can she get them to open their eyes to the magic in their lives? This endlessly surprising and heart-warming debut is the story of coming to terms with the magical things we take for granted every day-our friends, our community, and, most of all, ourselves.
Six years after the phenomenal success of The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger has returned with a spectacularly compelling and haunting second novel set in and around Highgate Cemetery in London.
When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina. These two American girls never met their English aunt, only knew that their mother, too, was a twin, and Elspeth her sister. Julia and Valentina are semi-normal American teenagers–with seemingly little interest in college, finding jobs, or anything outside their cozy home in the suburbs of Chicago, and with an abnormally intense attachment to one another.
The girls move to Elspeth’s flat, which borders Highgate Cemetery in London. They come to know the building’s other residents. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword puzzle setter suffering from crippling Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Marjike, Martin’s devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth’s elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt’s neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including–perhaps–their aunt, who can’t seem to leave her old apartment and life behind.
Niffenegger weaves a captivating story in Her Fearful Symmetry about love and identity, about secrets and sisterhood, and about the tenacity of life–even after death.
Mason “Mace” Perry was a firebrand cop on the D.C. police force until she was kidnapped and framed for a crime. She lost everything-her badge, her career, her freedom-and spent two years in prison. Now she’s back on the outside and focused on one mission: to be a cop once more. Her only shot to be a true blue again is to solve a major case on her own, and prove she has the right to wear the uniform. But even with her police chief sister on her side, she has to work in the shadows: A vindictive U.S. attorney is looking for any reason to send Mace back behind bars. Then Roy Kingman enters her life.
Roy is a young lawyer who aided the poor until he took a high-paying job at a law firm in Washington. Mace and Roy meet after he discovers the dead body of a female partner at the firm. As they investigate the death, they start uncovering surprising secrets from both the private and public world of the nation’s capital.
Soon, what began as a fairly routine homicide takes a terrifying and unexpected turn-into something complex, diabolical, and possibly lethal.
In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable’s girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County–to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto–pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them.
In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River–John Irving’s twelfth novel–depicts the recent half-century in the United States as “a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course.” From the novel’s taut opening sentence–“The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long”–to its elegiac final chapter, Last Night in Twisted River is written with the historical authenticity and emotional authority of The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. It is also as violent and disturbing a story as John Irving’s breakthrough bestseller, The World According to Garp.
What further distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author’s unmistakable voice–the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller. Near the end of this moving novel, John Irving writes: “We don’t always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly–as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth–the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives.”
While I’ll admit that my fascination with snow globes initially drew me to this book (how do they get the water in there? How?) the plot completes the one-two punch. Mathilda Savitch’s older sister is dead, and in order to bring her parents out of their grief-stricken stupor, she has decided to begin behaving badly–and digging into the mystery surrounding her sister’s murder. A coming-of-age story with a plucky narrator and an intriguing hook: how can you go wrong?
…Heartsick, by 
If you’re in the mood for chick lit nestled in a cozy land of magical realism, When Autumn Leaves may be just the ticket. Author Amy S. Foster has created a fictional coastal town called Avening where the impossible is possible and a mystical sisterhood called the Jaen is losing their leader Autumn; the challenge is choosing a replacement from a bevy of interesting, complex female characters (hence the cute double-meaning title). The cover is glowing with warm autumnal shades of orange offset by a black latticework-like border of leaves, and the loveliness of the image suggests that the reader’s journey with one filled with vivid images and lyrical writing.
Audrey Niffenegger
John Irving’s 