{read: The Bee List} A collection of Bee novels

The title of Lisa O’Donnell’s January debut, The Death of Bees, brought to mind the obvious almost-opposite title, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. And that reminded me of Little Bee by Chris Cleave, which is one of my all-time favorite books. Here’s a short tour of The Bee List, each featuring distinct first-person female narrators.

1. The Death of Bees offers three voices, each with its own clear perspective on the world. Interestingly, I found myself paying the most attention at first to Nelly, whose chapters are rarely longer than a few paragraphs. While her older sister Marnie and their neighbor Lennie tell most of the story, Nelly has so little to say that you feel it has to be important. Yet it was the first few lines, which are in Marnie's voice, that convinced me to give this one a try:

 

Today is Christmas Eve. Today is my birthday. Today I am fifteen. Today I buried my parents in the backyard. Neither of them were beloved.


Marnie and Nelly are determined not to go into foster care and set out to cover up their parents' deaths until Marnie turns 16 and is a legal adult. Will they succeed? This story is set in the low-rent district of Glasgow amidst grinding poverty, but perhaps surprisingly, it's a story that's more about hope than despair.

2. The Secret Life of Bees featured Lily Owens, a white girl escaping from her father and searching for her mother in 1960s South Carolina. She and Rosaleen, the black woman who is the closest thing she’s known to a mother, take off on foot and end up seeking shelter with three black beekeeping sisters. This bestselling coming-of-age tale about mothers and daughters, told in Lily’s irreverent voice, will charm you. It’s a best-selling classic Southern novel.

3. Little Bee’s title character is a teenage Nigerian girl who, after a chance encounter on an African beach with an upscale English couple on holiday, barely escapes with her life. She eventually winds up in an English immigration removal center, which is where asylum seekers are sent. When she’s finally released, she sets out on foot across the country to find Sarah and Andrew. (No, this isn't the fictional UK equivalent of Wild.) But, as she and Sarah learn, that brief encounter on the beach has lasting consequences. One of my favorite characters was Sarah’s young son, Charlie, who is convinced that he’s Batman and battles the “baddies.” The searing voice of Little Bee will stay with you long after you finish this tour de force that shows us what globalization really means.

 

{read: psychological thriller} Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

I am coming late to the Gone Girl party, and I suspect that many of you will not like what I have to say. This was one of the most hyped books of 2012, and I couldn't wait to read it. It seemed that everywhere I turned, people were reading it, loving it, and urging me to read it. I'd read Gillian Flynn before, and while I didn't fall in love with her books, I enjoyed them. I was expecting fireworks, something that was head-and-shoulders above her previous books. What I got was more like a sparkler.

Perhaps it was the hype, and perhaps no book could have lived up to it, but I disliked Gone Girl so much during the first third of the book that I almost didn't finish it. It sat on my table as I picked up another book and then another. The eager hopefulness in Amy's diary entries, contrasted with the contempt Nick showed toward Amy in his sections, turned my stomach. Yet, eventually I made it to the second third of the book, where the POV changed. Suddenly, I was intrigued. The change of narrator was interesting. I wanted to see what would happen next, what this person had to say. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm didn't last long. The plot felt contrived (although there are a few surprises), and while I briefly enjoyed pondering the difference between sociopath and psychopath and wondering which definition better fit these characters, in the end it wasn't a book that I'd recommend. It wasn't just that I didn't like the characters; it was that they weren't interesting. Beyond a few brief moments, I didn't much care what they'd do next. While the best books I've read have characters with voices so captivating that I'd listen to them do their Saturday chores and follow them down the grocery store aisles to see what kind of pasta sauce they'd choose, neither Nick nor Amy inspired this interest in me, and the plot wasn't exciting enough to make up for it. I was glad to be done with this book.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (Crown, 2012)
My rating: 2.5 stars

{read: baseball and life}: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach is a slow starter but once it picks up momentum, it keeps rolling until the end. I put it down after about 150 pages and wasn't sure if I'd pick it back up again, but I kept wondering what would happen to the characters, so I decided to finish it and, surprisingly, it's ended up in my favorites list and with a four-star rating. At its heart, this is a story about what you do when the things you planned and hoped and worked for don't happen, told through the story of three college baseball players, a high school dropout, and a college president. How do you deal with defeat? How do you move on to the next stage, and how do you even figure out what's next? The characters of Henry, Pella, Schwartz, and Owen are all very believable and I found myself rooting for them. They showed growth throughout the book, but it was in small, lifelike spurts.

There were also several passages in this book that I made me say, "Yes! That's it!" It made me reflect again on the fact that the best fiction carries truth at its heart. Harbach and his characters gave words to the same things that I've thought or felt but not been able to express so eloquently.

I do have two criticisms to offer. The first is the use of the word "freshpersons" instead of "freshmen." This alone was almost enough to make me stop reading. Luckily, Henry moves on through college and its use becomes less frequent, but it was very jarring to me. It sounded pretentious and threw me out of the story every time I saw it on the page.

The second is the way the situation with Affenlight was resolved. Without giving it away, I'll say that I saw it coming a few pages before and think it was the easy choice. While it may have been a realistic resolution in terms of the plot, I expected better from Harbach by this point in the book. He had already surprised and delighted me a few times and I thought I could count on him not to take the easy out. That being said, this is definitely still a book worth reading with an excellent, pitch-perfect (baseball pun not intended) ending.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (Little, Brown and Company, 2011)
My rating: 4 stars

{read: Swedish crime thriller} The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler

Although he (she?) is billed as the next great Swedish author, Lars Kepler (the pen name of a couple) lived up to the hype. Think Stieg Larsson minus the social commentary and history, but keep the unexpected plot turns, suspense, and believable characters, and you have Lars Kepler.

The story starts out with a gruesome massacre, and hypnotist Erik Maria Bark is called upon to hypnotize the gravely wounded son, the only witness, so that the police can try to identify and catch the killer before he find's the family's other remaining living member, the boy's sister. But what Erik finds out surprises Detective Joona Linna, who has a track record of always solving his crimes. As they begin to act upon what they learned, they discover there are unforeseen consequences of Erik's action. Ten years ago, he promised that he would never hypnotize anyone again after an incident involving one of his patients. In addition to this, he's also dealing with his own problems, including a prescription drug addiction and a marriage that's falling apart. Just like in real life, everything seems to fall apart at once for Erik.

The many layers of this complex story kept me turning the pages. Just as one plot thread seems to get resolved, another one develops and moves into the forefront. What you discover in the end isn't what you were looking for in the beginning. I'm looking forward to the next translations of Kepler's work.

The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011)
My rating: 4 stars

{read: great chick lit} Then Came You by Jennifer Weiner

I've been a fan of Jennifer Weiner since she started to publish novels, in part because I followed close upon her footsteps as a reporter at the Centre Daily Times newspaper in State College, Pa. In fact, one of the superintendents that I covered used to call me Jennifer sometimes. I look forward to her books because they're usually a light, refreshing, quick read, like eating a dish of orange sherbet while you're dangling your feet in the pool. All of that being said, this is by far her strongest book. She uses a rotating point of view to tell the story of Jules (egg donor), Annie (surrogate mother), India (adopting mother), and Bettina (India's stepdaughter) and delve into the stories of these very different women who become linked by one baby. The plot may be somewhat predictable, but I enjoyed the character development and thought that the writing grew stronger and the novel went on. I'd definitely recommend this as a good book to read this summer.

Then Came You by Jennifer Weiner (Atria, 2011)
My rating: 4 stars

{read: bestseller} Room by Emma Donoghue

This story is told by Jack, a five-year-old boy who's spent his entire life in one room because his mother was kidnapped. Two years into her captivity, she gives birth to Jack, and when he's five years old, she figures out a way for them to escape. But the outside world, for Jack, is a scary place. While Room was a prison cell for his Ma, it was Jack's only home. Life on the outside turns out to be more difficult than Ma had imagined, and Jack sometimes wishes they could return to Room. He misses their daily routines and different objects from their home, all of which have names.

Jack is an interesting character: He knows big words and can do more math than you'd expect a five year old to be able to do, but his social skills are understandably stunted since he's only ever interacted with his Ma. I think that choosing him to tell the story gave it a unique twist. I also liked watching Jack's growth, especially when he stayed with his grandma. She seemed to push him toward "normal" behavior more than his mother did. Of course, Ma had her own issues to deal with as a young 20-something mother who’d spent so many years locked up. Although Jack sees her as his all-powerful mother, in reality she is a fragile young woman who did the best she could under difficult circumstances. Her fragility becomes most evident after the escape, when she has a difficult time dealing with all the stresses of life and takes some drastic action.

Just out in paperback, this is a great read with a unique narrator. My book club has chosen it as an upcoming selection, and I’m looking forward to our discussion.

Room by Emma Donoghue (Little, Brown and Company, 2010)
My rating: 4 stars

{read: mystery} Darkness, Take My Hand by Dennis Lehane

This book, the second in Lehane's Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro series, has enough twists and turns to keep you guessing. Kenzie and Gennaro, private detectives in Boston, take a case in which a psychologist seems to be threatened by the Irish mafia and receives a picture of her son in the mail. But as the story develops and the gruesome deaths keep on coming, the evidence seems to point to a killer who's been in jail for 20 years. At the same time, Patrick is starting what might be a serious relationship with a surgical resident and Angie is struggling to put her 12-year marriage behind her.

Lehane's characters are troubled and flawed, yet realistic and funny. The prose is clean, the dialogue is crisp, and the pacing is perfect. I'm a huge fan of the Kenzie and Gennaro series. As one of my friends said, Kenzie and Gennaro are her favorite detective pair. I agree. The six books in this series, ending with the recently released Moonlight Mile, are time well spent.

Darkness, Take My Hand by Dennis Lehane (HarperTorch, 1996)
My rating: 5 stars

{read: bestselling fiction} The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht

This is one
This is one of the best books I've read recently. It's a perfect blend of storytelling, a protagonist I liked but who was complex, and a hint of magical realism. After being disappointed by Open City, which many people loved but I couldn't get into, I was glad that this much-hyped book lived up to the buzz for me.

Natalia Stefanovi is searching for answers to her grandfather's death in a war-torn Balkan country that's strongly reminiscent of the former Yugoslavia. Like her grandfather, she's a doctor, and she learns of his death when she and her longtime friend, Zora, are traveling to an orphanage across the border, post-war, to vaccinate the children. She was the only one who knew he had cancer, but she didn't know he had left home, ostensibly to see her, and she didn't know that he had died until she returns a page from her grandmother. (She and Zora have pagers but no cell phones.)

Pieces of this book hit just the right tone, neither too subtle nor too heavy handed. I was almost holding my breath, waiting to see if Tea got it right, and I was never disappointed. In this, she reminds me of Tom Franklin and his dialogue in Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. Although these are two completely different stories, the authors find just the right tone and approach.

I'd definitely recommend this to anyone who doesn't mind a touch of the magical (a deathless man, for example) in their fiction. I know I'll be reading it again.

The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht (Random House, 2011)
My rating: 4 stars

Don’t miss these two great author events!
It’s {th}ink's first giveaway! You could win a signed, personalized copy of You Know When the Men are Gone by Siobhan Fallon.

April 1 - Author Nina Revoyr (Wingshooters) will be at Next Chapter Bookshop in Mequon, Wis., at 7 p.m. (See other tour dates/locations.)