The Flight of Gemma Hardy

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Joan

hardyI don’t usually like modernized versions of classic novels (they hardly ever live up), but I did like The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesey’s new Jane Eyre homage.

It’s the story of an Orkney girl raised by her unloving aunt in the 1950s who goes on to become a governess in the household of a wealthy, brooding Londoner living on the island.  Reader, you’ll know what happens next.

But since you may have to wait for a copy, I thought I’d re-recommend my favorite Austen homage, Pride, Prejudice, and Jasmin Field by Melissa Nathan, another modern take on a classic.  This one’s funny rather than brooding, delightfully light and satiric, the perfect tribute to the original.

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The Dispatcher

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Joan

dispatcher

Ian is a 911 dispatcher for a little Texas town.  It’s not quite like being a real cop, sending squad cars out for domestic abuse calls and farm accidents, but it’s close enough for a man with a bad knee and a sad past.

This morning’s call is a little different, though—the girl on the other end of the line is Ian’s own daughter, Maggie.  And he and his ex held Maggie’s funeral four months ago.

That’s the suspenseful opening of Ryan David Jahn’s novel The Dispatcher.  As the reader quickly learns, Maggie was snatched from her bed seven years before and has been held by her abductor in the same little town, kept in the basement to replace a child who died.

Ian, who was out with his wife the evening Maggie was taken, is not going to fail his little girl again. Though she isn’t at the pay phone when the cops show up, Ian will do anything he has to do to find her and bring her home. 

If you like novels with tightly-ratcheted, psychologically intense plots , turn your phone off and settle in with this one.

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Working in the Shadows

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Joan

Gabriel Thompson, a young journalist interested in immigration and other social issues, decided to work undercover at several jobs that typically employ immigrant laborers—agriculture, meat processing, and the restaurant industry. 

The result is Working in the Shadows:  A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do, his account of harvesting lettuce, processing chicken, working in the floral industry, and riding a bike to deliver takeout in New York City.

You won’t be surprised to hear that he found the work generally backbreaking and poorly paid, though the skilled workers in the lettuce fields had less mind-numbing work than the chicken processors, whose jobs were completely soulless (though ironically supervised by people concerned for the workers’ souls). 

Investigative journalism, especially the I-was-there type, is always interesting, and you could hardly find a more topical topic these days.

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To Be Sung Underwater

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Joan

I think I heard about this one from Nancy Pearl—she’s the source of some of the enormous to-be-read pile of books waiting for me.

Tom McNeal’s To Be Sung Underwater is a nostalgic story of first love. 

Judith’s marriage has become a little stale, a little contentious.  When her husband puts her old bedroom furniture out for the Salvation Army without asking her, Judith reassembles it in a storage unit and starts retreating there from the (almost) certain knowledge that he is having an affair.

All of which explains why she’s thinking about Willy Blunt, the boy she loved passionately as a teenager when she and her father moved to small-town Nebraska. 

The reader gets the story of Judith’s present life and her past with Willy in alternating narrative streams.  It’s wonderfully familiar stuff for anyone who has loved and lost, and of course, there’s the suspense of what Judith will do if she is able to track Willy down. 

Things don’t end quite as Judith expects; you might clue in earlier than she does, but it doesn’t matter, as this is still a satisfying sort of read.  I’m always interested when men create female main characters and vice versa, too, so there’s that as well.

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The Windup Girl

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Joan

Here’s another interesting science fiction title for you, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl—very different from Boneshaker!

In a post-“Contraction” world, agriculture has repeatedly collapsed due to plagues and monopolies on genetically engineered plants.  Only ruthless vigilance against the import of contaminants has kept Thailand alive, though without the luxuries of the Expansion era.  Computers are now run by treadles, engines run by springs wound by genetically altered elephants, and people live in slums at the base of Bangkok’s ruined high rises.

 A western “calorie man” (agribusiness corporation man) comes to Thailand to find Thailand’s secret seedbank and an errant genetic engineer.  His actions set off mayhem in the city and affect the fates of several characters, including the genetically engineered woman of the title.

Bacigalupi creates a brilliantly plausible near future where energy is literally counted by the calorie as humanity struggles to produce enough food to support itself.  He sets this all in steamy hot Bangkok being swallowed by a terrifying version of the jungle—not fertility but fertility gone wrong. 

Algaepunk?

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Boneshaker

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Joan

boneshakerSteampunk and zombies, oh my!

In Cherie Priest’s alternate-history Boneshaker, an invention designed to mine gold in the Klondike has undermined the frontier town of Seattle and released a seeping gas that turns people into zombies.  The luckier portion of the population escaped as huge walls were erected around the dying town; some still live like rats underground, using breathing equipment to hold back the eerie fog.

Briar Wilkes is technically one of the lucky ones, scraping a living and raising her teenaged son, Zeke.  But she’s a virtual outcast, as her husband was the inventor who built the disastrous rogue machine.  Her father was a hero or outlaw of the calamity, depending on your view, as he broke open the jail and released its occupants before the fog could claim them.

Now Zeke has tunneled into the old city, determined to resurrect his grandfather’s reputation.  Briar follows him, of course.  What neither of them know is just how dangerous the zombie hordes are within the walls, nor who controls the ragged remnants of the living population—a mad engineer who just may be Briar’s husband.

Classic steampunk (goggles on the cover are always a good clue!) energetically mixed with the zombie novel, and featuring dirigible pirates and fantastical mechanical contrivances, this is a lot of fun for fans of a lot of fantasy types.

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