Review: The Forgotten Garden, by Kate Morton

If Beatrix Potter wrote mysteries, or family drama, the result would probably be much like Kate Morton's second novel, 'The Forgotten Garden'.

The expansive story opens in 1913 London, where a small girl is crouched alone, hiding on an ocean liner per the instructions of someone she knows only as 'The Authoress'. When the woman does not return as promised, the four year-old is forced to make the sea voyage alone, winding up in Australia without a clue as to who she is or why she's alone. She is adopted by a childless couple and named Nell, and forgets the issue entirely until the night of her twenty-first birthday, when her adoptive father makes the fateful decision, against the will of his deceased wife, to divulge the secret that her past is really a mystery to them all. Nell, feeling completely abandoned by both her perception of reality and her trust and faith in the concept of family, withdraws from her adoptive family and begins an entirely new life. Years later, when the man she had thought was her father dies, she receives a suitcase from his estate; it is the suitcase she had arrived with so long ago, and in it a path to her past. Nell then begins in earnest the search for her real past, a search which is eventually handed down to her granddaughter, Cassandra. The mystery takes them each back to London, to an estate and a family cursed with illness, paranoia, and murderous darkness.

The Forgotten Garden is a rich, enticing story told by several different people, in a multitude of times and places. Initially, this made it difficult for me to follow, but once new characters stopped being intruduced, and when the story took up a set cadence, it was easier for me to manage the ever-changing perspective, although keeping events and people straight in my head was still a slight challenge. Also peppered throughout the novel are short fairy tales, written by The Authoress, in which are woven the sad and sometimes frightening realities of her life, and which serve as clues for Nell, Cassandra, and the reader as we all try to close the circle of curiosities.

I liked ...Garden quite a bit. Not only is it a very satisfying mystery, but it moves along at a good pace and involves a good balance of good and evil; Morton does an excellent job of making the characters multi-dimensional, and trusts the reader to incorporate new character developments without either hitting you over the head with heavy-handed black-and-white descriptions of their personalities or rushing to solve things for you. I think that one of the signs of a good writer is the novelist's ability to restrain his- or herself and allow the readers time to figure out what's going on on their own before dealing the final blow, and Morton does this very well. She also does an excellent job of creating a mystery that reveals itself in layers, so even if you figure out the answer to one thing fairly early on, there are still so many other questions that you don't lose interest.

My only complaints are as follows: I would have liked more on both Nell's and Cassandra's relationship with Nell's daughter/Cassandra's mother. We hear from everyone's persepective but hers, and I think something more from or about her would have been interesting. Some of the descriptions were a little long, but skimmable, as were the fairy tales. Also, the introduction of Christian, the gardener, to Cassandra was a little convenient and seemed beneath the rest of the book.

Rating: 4.5 out of five stars - very good plot and characters, emotionally absorbing, a little over-descriptive

Review: Still Alice, by Lisa Genova

If anyone you know has alzheimer's disease, is currently suffering from it, or may at some point be afflicted either personally or tangentally, you should read this book.

That would be everyone.

Beautiful, touching and very, very sad, Still Alice is told from the perspective of Alice Howland, a fifty year-old psychology professor at Harvard who is diagnosed with early-onset alzheimers at the height of her career. Soon, rather than travelling the country making symposium speeches and conducting world-renowned research, she is struggling to remember her children's names and getting lost on her way home. Eventually, she has to leave her job, and must learn to define her worth as a person, without her life's work as a guide.

As the novel, and the disease, progress, the reader also is faced with questions, such as what it means to be 'of sound mind'. Alice, while still in possession of most of her faculties, writes herself a letter on her computer with instructions on how to find and take an overdose of sleeping pills when she can no longer remember the answers to five important questions, because she doesn't feel that she wants to live to be a burdensome shadow of herself. Her husband feels that he should continue to pursue his career, because she would have wanted him to when she was mentally clearer. As Alice becomes more confused, both of those things become untrue in her present-tense, so which opinions and feelings should have more weight - her 'sane' past self, or her present 'demented' self? Which should take prescedence, rational thought or emotional need? Where does our humanity lie?

Genova, a neuroscientist herself, takes the more painful route by writing the novel in Alice's own rapidly changing perspective to the end. As a result, the reader feels her confusion, and not only observes but experiences her increasing dementia. It would have been emotionally easier to read the second half of the story from the family's point of view, but this is infinitely more worthwhile. We do, however, see the couple's children's struggle with acceptance and coping, and even more intimiately that of her husband, John, who cannot cope with this ultimate upheaval in his life's plans. On the one hand, it would be easy to write John off as an uncaring, emotionally detached, scientist-first kind of person, but on the other, who among us would be able to deal easily with the destruction of our current lives, hopes and future by a disease that doesn't typically occur until life has been almost fully lived? Alice's heartbreak over the thievery of their marriage, and the loss of the many things the future should have held for her, is one of the most compelling plot lines in the book. My one complaint, that I'm not exactly sure what happened at the ending, is bittersweet; the reason *I* am fuzzy on the events is because Alice herself is.

'Alice' is a quick read, even at 320 pages. The chapters are short, and really, you won't notice them going by. I'm so glad I read this book.

Rating: five out of five stars. Beautiful, important, and, ironically, memorable.

Review: The Music Teacher, by Barbara Hall

I'm not going to sugar coat this - The Music Teacher was not for me. But, since it might be for *you*, here's a go at a discussion.

Main character Pearl Swain has achieved nothing of note in her life. Her musical career is non-existent, her marriage has failed, she lives in a trailer, and works as a music teacher / sales clerk in a pretentious music store in LA. As the only woman in the store, several of the other employees are either interested in her or hiding that they are, but in typical geek fashion, this is played out in a strange dance of insecurity and pretended indifference.

The plot of the story circles around the arrival of Hallie Bolaris, a gifted violin student who has been orphaned and now lives with her seemingly dysfunctional aunt and uncle's family. Hallie's talent and family life slowly alter Pearl's perspective on life and emotional attachment, and she begins to take interest in more than the pain and self-pity that she has wallowed in since the demise of her marriage.

I believe what makes this first-person narrative unattractive to me may make it more so to others; this is very much the kind of behavior that goes on in the small, insular cliques of art or literary geeks, and I find it unappealing. However, if you are someone who takes part in that culture, you may find Pearl's story more appealing. Personally, I found the characters to be unlikable in any real way. The story was choppy, and Hallie was too contrived. Pearl's turnaround was too abrupt. Nothing about any of the characters really grabbed me, and even at the end, not too much had changed. I was looking for more novel and less mundane real life, and I didn't find it here. I think Hall could have written a more engaging novel, or at least one that would have engaged *me* more, but didn't.

In short, this is a very tightly-focused character study on an everyday woman whose life is a realistically small part of the universe. If that's your cup of tea, this is your book. It was not mine.

Rating: one out of five stars - flat, mildly depressing, and too narrow

Review: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford

I have rarely come by a novel that took on the topic of Japanese concentration camps in the US. It's a topic that our country is rightly ashamed of, and I think it gets swept under the rug too often. Ford pulls the reader into the topic like an olympic diver into a pool - swiftly, seamlessly, and beautifully - in his first novel, Hotel on the corner of Bitter and Sweet.

The story moves back and forth between present day, with main character Henry Lee as a middle-aged widower, and the 1940s, when Henry was a chinese-american 'scholarshipping' student at an all-white private school in Seattle. As an outcast in his chinese community for being at a the exculsive white school, and at the school for being chinese, Henry is even alone at his home, with parents who insist he speak only 'american', even while they themselves can only speak cantonese. Henry's solitary existence is broken only by interactions with Sheldon, a black streetcorner saxaphone player until Keiko, a Japanese-american student, enrolls at his school. Her arrival is a definite turning point in his life, and we see through his eyes and heart the changing American politial scene as the Japanese are first discriminated against and then, finally, rounded up and sent away to camps as WWII reaches its highest pitch.

I loved both the stories of Henry as a child and the shorter, interwoven tale of how his adult life has unfolded, with his own son and his fiancee. I loved the journey from silence to redemption, which is precipitated by the discovery of some hidden japanese articles that were hidden in an old hotel when the community was cast away. I loved this book.

Make time for this one, definitely. I genuinely loved the characters, and the story of childhood love and loss.

Rating: five out of five stars - touching, smooth and engrossing

Review: The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

Here's another run-out-and-read-it for you.

Kathryn Stockett's The Help is a beautifully and honestly written tale of african-american servitude in the 1960s south, and one journalist-hopeful's documentation of it.

One of the things I loved about this novel was its varying viewpoint, which rotated between 22 year-old Skeeter, a well-off white girl who had just returned home from college with a mind full of plans but a reality full of nothing much, and several of the domestic servants she comes to know and who slowly share their lives with her as she writes down their stories into an extremely subversive narrative of what it is like to be a black domestic in the deep south. Through Skeeter's voice we hear of her struggles to cope with her increasingly strained friendships with the other young elite of Jackson, most of whom have stepped in to hold the reins of oppression where their parents left off, and their eventual ostrasization of her from society. Through Abiline, Minny, and others, we hear what they dealt with both as 'free' help, raising white children while their own children were cared for by relatives or given away, navigating segregation and the dangerous waters of unwritten social rules that could change at any moment. The danger that they and Skeeter are in as they undertake this project, and the slow, painful road to trust, are tense and lovely.

I could see these people in my mind as I read the book. Stockett's care with detail is such that it was very like having a movie playing in my mind, and the picture was complete. I wanted the book to continue past its ending, which was satisfying and appropriate in itself, so I could continue to follow these women as they went through desegregation and the strife of the future.

Rating: five stars. Excellent reading.

Review: My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor. PhD

At 37, Taylor was in what most consider to be the prime of her life. She had a very successful career as a brain scientist and professor at Harvard Medical School, and had many friends and close colleagues. Yet in her memoir, My Stroke of Insight, Tayler herself argues that her life really began one early morning in 1996, when she had a massive stroke due to a blood clot in her brain, and observed herself lose her speech, mobility, and various other capacities one by one, understanding as only one in her profession could exactly what was happening to her.

'Insight' is written in three sections: first, there is a background discussion of the brain and how it functions. While somewhat interesting to the neophyte, it isn't necessary to understand the rest of the novel, and I myself skimmed it, as what I was really interested in began in section two. (The author herself discusses the various sections in the prologue, and recommends starting points in the book depending on what you're looking for, which I thought was reflective of her post-stroke zen outlook. It's not often that an author gives a reader permission to skip entire sections of a book.) This next part is where Taylor details the events of the morning of her stroke, and it's fascinating. The story of how she saved herself once she understood what was happening, by using her training and determination, is compelling. She discusses her experiences in the hospital, and her perceptions and feelings regarding not only her family and friends but the hospital's staff as they worked either with her or on her, depending upon the mood in which the staffer entered the room, and how they affected her recovery process.

Also in segment two, Taylor talks about how, as her stroke was in her left brain, all sense of her own ego and personal space had vanished, along with her abilities to feel negativity, such as anger or jealousy. She realized that since she had to work to regain her abilities in her right brain, she would also do her best *not* to work on regaining her ability to feel these things, and to maintain some sense of the 'nirvana', as she calls it, that she achieved during her stroke. Section three is a discussion of how we non-stroke-victims can work to achieve the same effects.

While I was interested in Taylor's personal story, including her miraculous eight-year road to full recovery, I did find myself skimming through section three as well. It grew repetitive, and was a little too new-agey for me. I do believe that it's important to focus on the positive, but section three was very much like a self help book, and I was only so interested in that. Taylor speaks of wanting to retain her child-like joy and views, and I believe that the success she achieved in that is what made the final section what it was. Interestingly enough, her diction remains quite high, so even as her child-like qualities come across, they do so in a very adultified way. It's a little strange, actually, but not in a bad way.

Overall, I'm glad I read it. I did take away both an interesting story and some reminders on how to seek my own inner peace, and that was enough.

Rating: three out of five stars. Interesting, but somewhat repetitive and new-agey.