AMERICANAH by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (fic)

I loved this book!  Adichie is a brilliant writer.  I equally enjoyed her previous book, Half a Yellow Sun which won the Orange prize.  There is an absorbing story in her new book as well as a lesson we could all benefit from.  Adichie is never preachy or patronizing, yet she enlightens the reader through the eyes of her characters.  She teaches us a lesson about race and stereotyping and the loneliness of missing love and companionship.  The theme that runs through the book is the difference between Africans and African Americans and how people perceive them without understanding. The setting shifts with the telling of the stories of two main characters who live in Nigeria, Britain and the United States.

The tale opens in Lagos, Nigeria where we meet two high school students Ifemelu and Obinze who fall in love.  They never fall out of love, but they become separated by time, distance and the different paths their lives follow.  We learn about everyday life in middle class Nigerian families in this section of the book.

Ifemelu eventually moves to the United States to further her education.  This is the most interesting part of the book to me, as Adichie shows the reader through Ifemelu that there is a large difference in experience and temperament between American blacks and Africans.  It is not only that their English sounds different, there is a cultural gap as well.   Ifemelu finds her footing in her new country, and she has an affair with a white American who is the brother of a sincere, but clueless blond yummy mummy who has hired her as a nanny.  As Ifemelu grows in her cultural understanding of Americans, black and white, she becomes a well-known and successful blogger on cultural differences among blacks.  She receives a fellowship from Princeton and falls in love with a black professor at Yale.

While Ifemelu is having her awakening in the States, Obinze is having his own experience in Britain where he has gone to further his studies.  Adichice is equally observant of the black cultural experience in London where there is a large population of Jamaicans who are distinct from the Africans who have immigrated to England. Obinze is less outspoken than Ifemelu who never hesitates to voice her strong opinions.  Unlike Ifemelu who holds a green card in America, Obinze is an illegal in London and he eventually is found out and deported.  When he arrives back in Nigeria his life takes a turn for the better, and as the years go by that separates the former lovers,  he becomes a successful businessman and property developer.  He marries and fathers a child.

After her relationship with the professor falls apart, Ifemelu makes the decision to return to Nigeria.  Now as a adult, she is seeing her countrymen through eyes that have seen the world in a different light.  The society she enters into is one not unlike that of the American nouveau rich where there is one upmanship, jealousy and jockeying for social position.  In Lagos she finds a pecking order not so different than its American counterpart.

Adichie turns a critical eye equally on Britain, America and Nigeria. Through Ifemelu's blog, she is unsparing but honest in her commentary.  Much of the book is drawn on Adichie's own experiences.  This novel tells a fascinating story of love and loss and humanity.  I highly recommend it to all readers, and it will evoke an interesting discussion in reading groups. As an aside, I just read an article that said the book will be made into a movie staring Lupita Nyong'o who was an Academy Award winner this year.

BLUE MONDAY by Nicci French (fic)

Nicci French is the pen name of a husband and wife writing team, Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. Blue Monday is the first book in a mystery series which features Freida Klein, a psychotherapist. This gives the book a different slant, having a physician rather than a detective as the sleuth.  I enjoyed this book, and I will certainly look forward to reading the others in the series. It is a good summer book, full of suspense and odd characters.

The story opens in 1987 with the tale of two young sisters, on the way to a sweet shop.  Joanna Vine, the younger sister disappears when her older sister, Rosie, is distracted in the sweet shop by a friend.  Joanna is never found, leaving the detective in the case, frustrated and unable to let go of the unsolved mystery. 

The story then switches to 2009 when Freida Klein, when treating an anxiety patient named Alan Dekker, becomes suspicious of his stories of dreams and seeming fixation on children.  Alan suffers from panic attacks and compulsions he cannot seem to control.  While he is being treated by Freida, another young child, Matthew Farady goes missing in an eerily similar circumstance to that of Joanna Vine.

Working with DCI Malcolm Karlsson and her medical mentor Reuben McGill (a burned out psychiatrist) Freida puts herself in danger as she pursues answers to the mysterious disappearance of Matthew which she is convinced is connected in some way to the earlier kidnapping.

The book is well written and plotted.  It is a page turner and will leave you ready to delve into the next book in the series, fittingly called Tuesday's Gone.

THE LUMINARIES by Eleanor Catton (fic)

Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize this year for The Luminaries.  Because it is such a unique novel, it stands alone and cannot be categorized as a certain genre.  Earlier this year, critics suggested that Donna Tartt's novel The Goldfinch was Dickensian in its story telling.  I never bought that comparison.  Equal to Tartt's in length, Catton's novel is more deserving of the comparison.  It certainly reads like a Victorian novel, but one without the cloying sentimentality of many writers in that era.

The story takes place in New Zealand (Catton's country) in about 1866 in a setting that seems akin to the rough American frontier towns spawned by the gold rush.  Hokitika in New Zealand's southwest is also experiencing gold fever.  Hokitika has its saloons, cheap hotels, brothels, a bank, a jail, and a mansion or two.  At the heart of the story is a mystery that is slowly revealed as the book moves toward its climax. The book is filled with disparate characters drawn together by their thirst for striking it rich.  As time goes on, each character is exposed, and the reader begins to put the pieces of the puzzle together once he/she gets beyond the misunderstandings and lies that bind the characters together. You must look sharp to unravel the mystery though, as the truth is revealed in bits and pieces going back and forth in time.  At the novels center, is a fortune in gold sewn into four gowns whose ownership is in dispute. 

The story opens at the Crown Hotel in the smoking room where 12 men who all play an important part in the book are gathered together.  Here is where our tale unfolds. Each section of the book is introduced by an astrological calendar that I did not understand, and I did not take the time to research, though I wonder if they give clues to solving the book's puzzle.  Like all frontier towns, the population was made up of young men eager for a fresh start. Standing in for the reader is a Scotsman named Walter Moody, a barrister whose greatest moment, in his young 28 year old life, is conducting the defense at a trial at the end of the book. As the trial proceeds, the reader begins to find answers to who is telling lies, who is innocent, who is guilty. 

Also at the heart of the book is a love story, though the lovers, Emery Staines and Anna Wetherell, are separated throughout most of the novel. A lonely man who dies in a remote cottage, a politician, a scheming madam named Lydia Wells who claims to be the dead man's wife, a Maori jade trader, two Chinese men, each with his own motives for being there, all these people are cause and effect in moving the story towards its ending.

All this is much too complicated to try to explain in any coherent manner.  You must read the book and find your own meaning.  If you like meandering Victorian novels in the manner of Dickens and mysteries like that in Our Mutual Friend or Edwin Drood, you will like this book.  It is a masterpiece of style and language.  If you are not fond of long novels which you must think on to find answers, run away; you will not enjoy this book.  As for me, I liked it very much, though I found the ending somewhat abrupt and not altogether satisfying.

THE BEAN TREES by Barbara Kingsolver (fic)

Although I have read several Kingsolver books, I had never read her first book, The Bean Trees. It is interesting to see her promise as a writer in this first effort.  Kingsolver has a way of teaching her readers a lesson about nature and human feeling that never sounds preachy.  Her causes are important ones.  As in her later books, her prose is rich, realistic and as vivid as the Arizona sunshine that is the setting for this novel.  She is an expert in character dialogue, the colorful speech patterns and language of the south country.

Taylor (a name she invents for herself) Greer has had enough of her small Kentucky home town and finding herself stuck in an unrewarding job decides to pull up stakes and take a road trip across the country.  She more or less tapes her old heap of a car together and sets out.  She has a bit of Cherokee in her, and she imagines herself finding luck in Oklahoma. Instead she finds Turtle, or rather Turtle finds Taylor.  Turtle is an abused and deeply silent Cherokee child who finds her savior in Taylor.  Deciding Oklahoma is too flat and monotonous Taylor heads toward Arizona where a flat tire leads her to discover Mattie, a sort of den mother to immigrants on the road north.  Mattie owns Jesus Is Lord Used Tires in Tucson. Taylor is a truthful, honest and clear-thinking country girl.  Mattie takes her under her wing along with a house full of Guatemalan illegals.  Taylor is employed by Mattie who can't say no to anyone who needs help and direction. Once settled in, Taylor makes friends with Lou Ann, a young mother whose husband deserted her.  The two women and their children make a home as best they can, though they live on a shoestring.

Taylor and Turtle fit in well in Tucson, and though the book wallows in a bit of sentimentality that beggars belief at times, the story is interesting and engaging.  I wouldn't say this is Kingsolver's best work, but if you haven't read this one and are a fan, you will find it an uplifting summer read.

S IS FOR SILENCE by Sue Grafton

I was looking for some light reading and mysteries are usually a quick read as one becomes absorbed in solving them.  I have never read Sue Grafton and picked this book up at a library sale.  It was written in 2005, and those who are Sue Grafton fans will recognize that it is part of the alphabet series she has made her own genre.  I believe all her books end up on the best seller list as Grafton has a legion of fans.

The story revolves around a flamboyant woman in a small California town named Violet Sullivan who disappeared in 1953 with her little dog and a stash of cash.  Violet had a penchant for the color she was named after and a thirst for liquor and men.  The story moves back and forth between 1953 and 1987 which is the year her daughter Daisy hires Kinsey Milhone (a reoccurring character of Grafton's) to finally solve the mystery that has bedeviled her for most of her life.

I found the book to be standard mystery fare following the pattern of a whodunit formula. There is the usual small town characters with several red herrings thrown in, mostly men who had relationships with Violet.  There is the threat of danger to our brave detective. The characters are superficially drawn without much descriptive detail or depth in their relationships.  They could easily inhabit a graphic novel. 

If you are a Sue Grafton fan you will like this book for it moves along with enough twists to keep you interested.  The ending wraps up neatly with no gasps of surprise.

DOUBLE CROSS by Ben Macintyre (non-fic)

Macintyre has written an entertaining account of Operation Fortitude, a large scale attempt to fool the Germans into mistaking the plans for the D Day invasion of Normandy.  It was formulated to cause the Germans to believe that the actual landing would take place far north of Normandy in the Pas de Calais area. The account of these shenanigans reads like a British comedy, at times Monty Pythonesque.  The cast of characters is priceless. 

In his introduction, the author states that the oddball spies who were recruited to execute this plan were one of the oddest groups of military units ever assembled.  They included a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial Frenchwoman (of Russian background), a Serbian seducer, and a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming. 

This is a story of war, but it is also about the nuanced qualities of psychology, character, and personality; the thin line between fidelity and treachery, truth and falsehood; and the strange impulsion of the spy.  The Double Cross spies were, variously, courageous, treacherous, capricious, greedy, and inspired....One was so obsessed with her pet dog that she came close to derailing the entire invasion.  All were, to some extent, fantasists, for that is the very essence of espionage.  Two were of dubious moral character.  One was a triple, and possibly a quadruple, agent.  For another, the game ended in torture, imprisonment, and death.

The absurd notion that this group of turned spies could effect a complete pulling the wool over the German eyes, beggars belief.  But, somehow in a comedy of errors, they did.  Operation Double Cross under the leadership of a MI5 agent named Tommy Argyll Robertson who masterminded the ruse, was part of a larger plan called Operation Fortitude, in which a phony army of American and British, were able to make the Germans believe they were amassing in areas nowhere near their actual bases.  This included hallow models of planes, barracks, armaments and supplies.  It is all quite amazing, but certainly possible in this time before satellite spying and Internet bugging.  One interesting sidelight concerns Anthony Blunt who was later exposed as a Soviet mole.  He was part of the Double Cross deception at the same time he was feeding information to Stalin and the Russians.

One factor that made this operation successful is that the German counterpart to MI5, the Abwehr, was full of incompetent and corrupt officers who were skimming from the budget allotted by the German government for their spy operations.  It turned out that the Germans were paying so much to maintain these double agents who were working for the British that they spent what would be equivalent of more than 4.5 million pounds today, all the time ignorant of the fact that they were supporting both their own and MI5's spies.

At one point in this saga, there was a scheme that went nowhere, but was hilarious, which used pigeons to infiltrate the German pigeon coops in France which were used for sending messages to the battle front. Another crazy plot involved an actor impersonating General Montgomery who was sent to Spain to further confuse the Germans into mistaking the timing of D Day.

All this and more makes for entertaining reading.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and it further convinced me that all spies are double agents and straight out the pages of "Spy vs. Spy"  in Mad Magazine.  I recommend this book for any who would like a different take on behind the scenes planning in WWII.

THIRTY GIRLS by Susan Minot (fic)

In the light of the recent and horrifying kidnapping of 200 young Nigerian girls, this book could not have been written at a more meaningful time.  In 2002, a similar incident took place in Uganda when more than 100 girls were forcibly taken from their school in a rural area. Susan Minot had covered that story as a journalist and has now written a fictionalized account of it. Her seriously important book was published just before the Nigerian girls were taken. The Ugandan rebel who was responsible for the earlier kidnappings was Joseph Kony of the Lord's Resistance Army and he is still at large these many years later. 

Minot alternates chapters in Thirty Girls telling two stories that are intertwined and dependent on each other in unifying the tale.  The first is the fate of the the Ugandan girls who were led away into the bush.  The school they attended was run by Catholic nuns, and on the night the school was attacked and broken into, there were four nuns and only one man on duty.  The Ugandan army had been patrolling the school grounds but were off duty that night.   The Mother Superior, Sister Giula, an Italian of great courage, along with a male teacher, wastes no time in setting out after the girls to try to negotiate their return.  She catches up to the rebels and makes a plea to Captain Lagira, a terrifying creature.  After much false politeness and fearsome threats, he agrees to let all the girls go except 30.  The unfortunate Sr. Giula is told she must choose the girls that will stay behind.  One of these girls is Ester Akello, and it is through her eyes that we learn the fate and the nightmare that follows for these girls.  Ester's voice is so true and so real that we forget that this is a work of fiction as we become caught up in her story.

The other part of the book is about a reporter named Jane Wood who has come to Africa to write a story on the children who have survived the kidnapping ordeal by escaping.  These children, and Ester is eventually one, are placed in a rehabilitation camp in order to help them re-enter a life as normal as possible given the circumstances. Jane became interested in their story when she meet the mother of one of the kidnapped girls at a New York dinner where the mother was seeking aid to help these abused children.

Jane arrives in Kenya and meets up with a free spirited friend who introduces her to a group of like minded friends.  They all decide to travel to Uganda together so Jane can get her story.  Along the way they make stops and find time to party a bit, adventure a bit, and drink a good deal.  Jane finds herself drawn to Harry a young man about 15 years younger than she.  She realizes it is a hopeless romance with no future, but she falls headlong into the relationship anyway.  Minot writes sensitively and realistically about their affair.  In all her books, Minot writes convincingly about human interactions and connections.

The climax of the book occurs when Ester and Jane's stories intersect. Several important actions result from their meeting.  I loved this book.  Even though it deals with a difficult subject that today we are reading about daily, Minot never wavers from handling the story with care and beautiful writing.  I recommend this book most highly and have urged all my friends to read it.  It is timely, and the story of the two women shows them brave and fearless in their emotions and sense of self.  They finds themselves through the brief time they have together, and both recognize the connection.  This book is a terrific choice for book clubs and all readers.