Lisa See’s latest novel, Shanghai Girls, is a story of a family…but mostly it is a story about two women, specifically two sisters. May and Pearl are living in Shanghai in 1937. They are “beautiful girls” – born into wealth with all the privileges that entails. But when their father gambles away their life savings, both girls are sold into marriage to pay off the debt. Forced to marry two Chinese boys who currently live in Los Angeles, May and Pearl still hope to remain in Shanghai, working as beautiful girls and living their lives unchanged. Within weeks, however, the Japanese invade China and the girls flee their home to find passage on a ship to San Francisco. What follows is a journey marked by fear, violence, and uncertainty. When the shores of America are finally reached, Pearl and May must get through the labyrinth of immigration before they finally are reunited with their husbands in Southern California. But life is not what they expected.

What’s the first impression you have of a new place? Is it the first meal you eat? The first time you have an ice cream cone? The first person you meet? The first night you spend in your new bed in your new home? The first broken promise? The first time you realize that no one cares about you as anything other than the potential bearer of sons? The knowledge that your neighbors are so poor that they put only a dollar in your lai see, as if that were enough to give a woman a secret treasure to last a lifetime? The recognition that your father-in-law, a man born in this country, has been so isolated in Chinatowns throughout his life that he speaks the most pathetic English ever? The moment you understand that everything you’d come to believe about your in-laws’ class, standing, prosperity, and fortune is as wrong as everything you thought about your natal family’s status and wealth? – from Shanghai Girls, page 135 -

See’s novel takes the reader from the lavish streets of Shanghai to the isolation of immigration services on Angel Island in San Francisco, to the hectic streets of Chinatown in Los Angeles; and spans 20 years of American history and turmoil. Narrated in the distinct voice of Pearl, the eldest sister, the story explores a woman’s role in a traditional Chinese family, the discrimination leveled against Chinese immigrants in the United States during the 40s and 50s, and the relationship between two sisters. Ultimately a secret which Pearl and May keep throughout their lives has far reaching repercussions which neither young woman could possibly have imagined.

As in her previous novels, See develops memorable characters and has a firm grip on the historical details which bring to life the Chinese community in California during the mid twentieth century. If there is a fault in the novel, it is in the middle section when Pearl and May settle into their new lives.  Detailed and methodical, the story slows here and becomes a bit plodding at times. See redeems herself during the last fourth of the novel when the tension rises and secrets are revealed which spark conflict between the two sisters. It was during these last pages of the novel where See completely enthralled me.

Readers who have enjoyed See’s previous work will not be disappointed by this latest effort.

Read more reviews through TLC Book Tours.

Read my TLC Book Tour post and enter a contest to WIN THE BOOK (contest runs through January 23, 2010).

FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from the publisher through TLC Book Tours.

Many thanks to TLC Book tours, author Jennie Shortridge and Penguin Books for giving me the opportunity to read and review When She Flew (read my review). See all posts for this tour here.

A little about Jennie Shortridge:

Jennie Shortridge is a bestselling novelist with  four published novels to her credit: Riding with the Queen, (NAL 2003), Eating Heaven (2005),  Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe (2008), and now When She Flew (2009). Her nonfiction work has appeared regularly in magazines and newspapers, including Glamour, Mademoiselle, Natural Home, and others. The Seattle writer has been called “an accomplished and superior novelist” by the Statesmen Journal and “a writer to watch out for,” by the Rocky Mountain News.

When not writing, she spends time in the community helping kids and adults learn to write better, and in 2006 co-founded (with fellow Seattle author Garth Stein) a collective of Northwest authors whose mission is to create “connections 
between writers, readers, librarians and booksellers to foster and support a passion 
for the written word.” In 2009, they pledged to undertake several community outreach initiatives, including:  panel discussions and writing workshops with all or partial proceeds benefiting literacy programs in the Northwest; the development of community “pocket” libraries in unconventional places; and book club events to encourage community support of local libraries and independent booksellers.

To read more about Jennie Shortridge and her work, visit the author’s website.

When She Flew and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder):

Shortridge’s 4th novel centers around a true story of a war veteran and his daughter living off the land in a forested park in Portland in 2004. One of the themes of the novel is the challenges faced by those people suffering from PTSD. In the novel, Shortridge dispels some of the myths surrounding this disorder…including questions around the ability to effectively parent.

I love novels which inspire me to learn more about a subject…and When She Flew motivated me to read a bit about PTSD. I was familiar with the disorder through some education I received as part of being a Search and Rescue volunteer…and in fact, had suffered a episode of PTSD myself following a search where I was part of the team who located a suicide victim. Fortunately, I received good support from people close to me and was able to resolve the psychological trauma I had experienced, although that particular search will always be with me.

The U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs defines PTSD as:

[...]an anxiety disorder that can occur after you have been through a traumatic event. A traumatic event is something horrible and scary that you see or that happens to you. During this type of event, you think that your life or others’ lives are in danger. You may feel afraid or feel that you have no control over what is happening.

Anyone who has gone through a life-threatening event can develop PTSD. These events can include:

• Combat or military exposure
• Child sexual or physical abuse
• Terrorist attacks
• Sexual or physical assault
• Serious accidents, such as a car wreck.
• Natural disasters, such as a fire, tornado, hurricane, flood, or earthquake.

After the event, you may feel scared, confused, or angry. If these feelings don’t go away or they get worse, you may have PTSD. These symptoms may disrupt your life, making it hard to continue with your daily activities.

PTSD is a medical diagnosis, established in 1980, defining symptoms that last at least a month after experiencing a major trauma.

The Gateway to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Information website provides some great national and international links to learn more about the disorder and to locate help or treatment if you are suffering from it. One site they linked to really caught my attention. Gift From Within is a non-profit organization which is dedicated to those suffering from PTSD, those at risk of PTSD and those who care for traumatized individuals. They develop and disseminate educational materials and other resources through their website, and maintain a roster of survivors who are willing to participate in an international network of peer support.

If you or a loved one has suffered from PTSD, I urge you to check out some of the resources available to you on line, or contact local resources for treatment.

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BOOK GIVE-AWAY of When She Flew:

To wrap up my tour of this book, Jennie Shortridge has graciously agreed to give away a SIGNED copy of When She Flew to one of my readers. To enter the contest:

• Simply leave a comment on this post by 8:00am (PST) January 5th.
• Make sure you include a legitimate email address so I can contact you if you win.
• I will draw a name sometime on January 5th and announce the winner here on my blog.
• This giveaway is open to the U.S. and Canada.

Good luck!!

I was delighted to receive Maud Carol Markson’s newest novel Looking After Pigeon for a TLC Book Tour. There was something compelling to me about a five year old girl finding her way in the world after being abandoned by her father…and the book did not disappoint me (read my review). I was equally delighted when Markson agreed to write a guest post for my blog. Do you wonder where authors find inspiration for their books? I do. And so it was with great interest I read Markson’s words about how her writing seeks to find the truth in human experience and how that experience is a reflected in her characters.

A little bit about Maud Carol Markson:

Maud Carol Markson is the author of the novels When We Get Home, and Looking After Pigeon. She has taught writing at University of New Hampshire and Cabrini College and now lives in California with her husband and son, and her dog Molly, who is her constant writing companion. She can be reached at www.redroom.com and www.goodreads.com. Learn more about Markson and her work on her website: http://www.maudcarol.com.

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Guest Post: Maud Carol Markson

Some writers find it very easy to write about themselves, but I am not one of those authors—I guess that is why I write fiction. And that is why I am submitting a somewhat modified version of the guest post that I did for Meg Waite Clayton’s 1^st Books blog.

From the time I was told I would never grow up to be an elephant, I decided instead to grow up to be a writer (of course, to the adults who knew me, both probably seemed equally implausible). I wanted to be the person who wrote all those books I loved as a child, and all those books that kept my father engrossed every night so that when I talked to him he barely heard me. I wanted to be the writer of the books that filled my local library shelves. There I would walk once a week in the summer, and sit among the books, in the air-conditioned stacks, staring at their covers as if they could reveal the magic within. And then stacking up my selection of books to carry on the walk home, where they bumped against my side, reminding me with each step of what awaited me when I actually opened their covers and read their pages.

Books are still magical to me. I look at novels not as a means to escape from myself (although, happily, they often serve that purpose), but as a means to discover myself. As a young child, I discovered aspects of myself and my world in the characters of Harriet in Harriet the Spy and Julie in Up a Road Slowly, or Kit Tyler in The Witch of Blackbird Pond. As an adult, I cherished other favorites. It is not that the authors of these books are writing about me, or even about someone like me. What they are doing is finding some truth in their characters and in the human experience.

That is what I aim to do with my own writing. I wrote my first novel, When We Get Home (Bantam, 1989), when I was pregnant with my son and anxious about being a parent for the first time. It begins with the line: “In my family we are all disposable,” and it was that line that ran through my head over and over again until the character that speaks that line emerged. And then the rest of her family soon followed—the father with multiple divorces, the step-mother, the brother who flees from one relationship to another. Perhaps I felt that in writing about a family that disintegrates, I could keep my own family safe from a similar fate. And so far, it has worked.

In my novel, Looking After Pigeon (The Permanent Press, July 2009), it was another line that echoed: “My mother named her children after birds.” What kind of mother gives her children bird names? How does growing up with such a name make us who we are? In this novel, five year old Pigeon’s father disappears, leaving her to face a new life in an uncle’s house on the Jersey shore. My father never left me as a child, and I don’t even have an uncle, much less one who owns a house at the beach. My older sister never got pregnant. But like my character, Pigeon, I do find memory an “odd thing.” I call it selective memory: we remember what resonates most deeply for us. And of course, we all to some extent want someone to look after us. So although these characters are not me, the way they experience the world is me. They all in some way reveal parts of who I am. And hopefully reveal parts of my readers as well.

Many thanks to TLC Book Tours, Francine Prose and Harper Perennial for putting Goldengrove into my hands for review. I read this book the first part of this month (read my review) and was completely sucked into Prose’s beautiful writing and the story of Nico – a thirteen year old girl growing up in the wake of her older sister’s tragic death.

Goldengrove is about loss, grief and recovery. It struck me that readers who have lost a loved one from unexpected death, especially when that loved one is a child, might find this novel difficult to read. Below are a couple of links to organizations which provide support to individuals dealing with this kind of loss:

The Compassionate Friends

The mission of The Compassionate Friends is to assist families toward the positive resolution of grief following the death of a child of any age and to provide information to help others be supportive.

Today more than 600 chapters serving all 50 states plus Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico offer friendship, understanding, and hope to bereaved parents, siblings, grandparents, and other family members during the natural grieving process after a child has died. Around the world more than 30 countries have a Compassionate Friends presence, encircling the globe with support so desperately needed when the worst has happened.

Griefworks, BC

Griefworks BC exists through a partnership between Children’s & Women’s Health Centers of British Columbia and Canuck Place Children’s Hospice.

Griefworks BC facilitates access to bereavement support when and where it is needed.

Book Information:

Title: Goldengrove, by Francine Prose
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial; 1 edition (September 8, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0060560029
ISBN-13: 978-0060560027
Available wherever books are sold, including Amazon.

A little about Francine Prose:

Francine Prose is the author of fifteen books of fiction, including A Changed Man and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the nonfiction New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. Her latest novel, Goldengrove, was published in September 2008. She is the president of PEN American Center. She lives in New York City.

Listen to Francine Prose on BlogTalk Radio (air date September 24, 2009)

To read more reviews of Goldengrove, visit the tour page on TLC Book Tours for links.

When I first learned about Ru Freeman’s debut novel A Disobedient Girl on the TLC website, I knew immediately I wanted to read it. I love literary fiction set in foreign countries, and the author’s background as a political activist and journalist interested me. I was not disappointed. A Disobedient Girl is an amazing work of literary fiction (read my review). Many thanks to Lisa at TLC who was instrumental in putting this book into my hands.

Ru Freeman was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. She arrived in the United States to attend Bates College in Maine, and later returned to Sri Lanka where she completed her Masters in Labor Relations at the University of Colombo, and worked in the field of American and international humanitarian assistance and workers’ rights. Her political writing has appeared in English and in translation. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, Story Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, WriteCorner Press, Kaduwa and elsewhere and has been nominated for the Best New American Voices anthologies in 2006 and 2008. A Disobedient Girl is her first novel. Read more about Ru Freeman and follow links to interviews with her on her website (I especially found this interview with Bookslut to be fascinating).

Other links to articles and stories by this author you might be interested in reading:

• A poignant article about the 2004 Tsunami which struck Sri Lanka.
• Jesse’s Story
• What Could Be Said About Pedris Road
• Ru Freeman has written many journalism and opinion pieces. Links to those articles may be found on her website on this page.

I was thrilled when Ms. Freeman agreed to write a guest post for Caribousmom. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I have. I was also ecstatic when I was asked to write a guest post for the author’s blog – you can read what I wrote by visiting Ru Freeman’s blog today.

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Thinking Aloud About Time and Space

By Ru Freeman

There is at least as much difference of opinion regarding work-space for writers, as there are types of writers. Some need vast chunks of time, others need vast expanses of space, still others need to be surrounded by books while a few want nothing but themselves and their computer, typewriter or pen and page. Having grown up in a small country, in a small house with lots of people in it – both permanent inhabitants and routine transients – I find myself unable to reconcile my need for space and quiet and solitude with the fact that all three of those things are luxuries for most people on the planet. And yet, lately, the writer that I am has been craving exactly what the activist in me scorns.

First, there has been the inevitable travel associated with the publication of a book. The people and event seeking activist rushes out with glee to book signings, readings, panels, classes and discussions. Any chance to be out in the world, to be involved with its shenanigans, to impinge upon its course in some way is manna from heaven to her. But the writer that I am cringes in horror. My new novel hovers, untended in the not so recent past, my essays and short fiction go untouched, deadlines pass before my glazed eyes as though they are part of someone else’s life, my blog is turning into an embarrassment, and my sole claim to fame is the maniacal update of my Facebook status with which, I apparently hope to restore my reputation as a writer. Ugh.

Then there is the matter of publicity. Gone are the days when a writer wrote a book, sent it forth to make its way in the world, turned her back upon it and set herself to the task of writing something new. In a culture where literature is placed and marketed just as strenuously as the latest beauty product or electronic gadget, the writer is as much a part of the book and its package as is its cover and content. I empathize with my publisher who has to tussle and wrangle alongside all the other publishers in order to make my career as a writer successful and rewarding. But in the end the writing, which was the reason for being out with a book in the first place, begins to take a back seat to the performance of being The Writer. There goes that other block of time, eaten up by emails and phone calls hither and yon to booksellers and publicists and event coordinators and festival organizers and series curators and reviewers etc. etc.

I would not trade in the position of being a published author for the one of being an unpublished one, but I wish someone had told me that there is no freedom quite as assured, for a writer, as that time when you are still writing that first novel. I would have used that time a little better. I might have written longer, revised more, taken a few more risks. Or perhaps I wouldn’t have. Perhaps, like most women, I would have rushed full tilt toward the future, rearranging the rest of my life to make room for the most pressing need of the day be it writing my novel or supporting a political campaign or helping a village raise its children. Perhaps where I find myself now is all there ever is, just the same as it is for anybody else; this present moment, its own reality and the challenge that we remember to be grateful while we try to make the best of it.

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Recently I was delighted to accept Lisa Tucker’s latest novel The Promised World for a TLC Book Tour (read my review). Described by Booklist as a “natural born storyteller,” Lisa is also the author of The Song Reader, Shout Down the Moon, Once Upon a Day, and The Cure for Modern Life. Her books have been published in twelve countries and her work has been featured in Seventeen, Pages, and The Oxford American.  She has advanced degrees in English and Math, and has taught creative writing at the Taos Conference and at UCLA.  Lisa currently lives in Pennsylvania. To learn more about Lisa Tucker and her work, please visit the author’s website.

When I asked for a guest post, Lisa graciously agreed to provide one. Given the subject matter of her book, I believe this is not only a timely post, but a poignant one.

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Honoring a Loved One

by Lisa Tucker

Since The Promised World is about dealing with grief, I wanted to share with your readers something I wrote to honor someone I lost.  One thing I’ve learned over the years is that we never really get over grief, but talking—and writing—about the person we miss can really help. Thanks for inviting me to do a guest blog. 

The last time she visited, she was already sick. When she left, I walked around my house in a daze, inhaling the smells. In the kitchen, the odors from the supper she’d insisted on making the night before: salty grease from the fried chicken and okra, sticky sweetness from the strawberries and marshmallow yams. In the bathroom, the clean tang of her Avon astringent and body cream. And in the guest room, the vaguely floral smell that must have been her perfume, but seemed like the very scent of her.

Her name was Minnie Louise, a small-town Arkansas gal, but I called her Minna, because she thought it sounded French, mysterious. For years, we talked on the phone every morning, even when my husband and I weren’t getting along, even when I feared we’d end up divorced. Our relationship was one of the richest in my adult life, but whenever I told friends she was coming to visit me, they groaned. They all had mother-in-law horror stories. The very term mother-in-law seems to be only an occasion for jokes.

Did you hear the one about the mother-in-law who made a string of beautiful beads for her daughter-in-law, with a card that read, “Worry beads, for your busy little hands”?

I wring my hands; I also crack my knuckles, pick my nails, tear my cuticles. As a child these were embarrassing tics, but in Minna’s eyes they became signs of my sensitivity, of the harsh way she was sure the world had treated me. She respected me as a woman and a mother and a writer, and most important, she gave me back my position as a daughter. And I loved her with a child-like intensity that always wanted more.

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Read all the blog tours for this book and author:

Tuesday, September 1st:  Musings of a Bookish Kitty

Thursday, September 3rd:  Peeking Between the Pages

Tuesday, September 8th:  Fizzy Thoughts

Wednesday, September 9th:  The Eclectic Book Lover- review and author interview

Date TBD:  My Friend Amy

Friday, September 11th:  Serendipitous Reading

Monday, September 14th:  Cindy’s Love of Books

Tuesday, September 15th:  Booking Mama

Wednesday, September 16th:  Jenn’s Bookshelves

Thursday, September 17th:  2 Kids and Tired Book Reviews

Monday, September 21st:  Janel’s Jumble

Tuesday, September 22nd:  Caribousmom

Wednesday, September 23rd:  The Tome Traveller

Thursday, September 24th:  Books and Movies

Monday, September 28th:  A Sea of Books

Tuesday, September 29th:  GalleySmith

Wednesday, September 30th:  Shhh.. I’m Reading

Miriam Gershow is the author of The Local News (read my review; read an excerpt) which was published through Spiegel and Grau in February 2009. This would make a great book for discussion (get book group discussion questions). To read more about Miriam Gershow and her work, please visit the author’s website.

I asked Miriam Gershow to write a guest post for my blog, and she graciously agreed to do so. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.

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Guest Post: Author Miriam Gershow

The most common question I’m asked about The Local News is: “Were you inspired by a real missing person case?”  The second and third most common are probably:  “Do you have personal experience with someone who’s gone missing?” and “Did you do a lot of research about missing persons?”

People tend to be surprised when my answers are:  No, no, and uh, no.  They tend to be even more surprised when I say I never really considered The Local News to be a “missing person” story when I was writing it.  That’s the point when readers narrow their eyes at me a little, cock their head to the side and seem to be saying without saying, “Did you write the same book that I read?”

Let me explain.

I always conceived of The Local News as first and foremost, a coming of age story for Lydia Pasternak. Through much of the writing process, I thought of her brother’s disappearance as the backdrop to that coming of age.  In the words of one of my former writing teachers, I thought of Danny’s disappearance as a device.  It was a way blow wide open of the normal tensions of adolescence: feeling alone, being disoriented, having the sense that everything is changing and there’s no control over it.  It allowed me to set Lydia adrift from her parents, to uproot her from all that was familiar, to align her with a new group of friends, and to force her to confront uncertainty, loss and change in one of the most dramatic ways possible.

The questions I was most interested in answering were:  What if someone disappeared and the person left behind was ambivalent about it?   What happens to a family system if one of its key players is taken out of the picture?  What happens when you’ve lived in someone else’s shadow and you start to step out of that shadow?  How does one grow up in the face of both the normal traumas of adolescence and the extraordinary traumas of such a circumstance?  How does one learn to live and love and truly move on after a situation like this one?

So my interests were always of the human sort; they never included the details of the police work or the details of the searches or the details of the investigation, unless those details directly influenced Lydia’s experiences.  In my mind, the dividing line was clear: It wasn’t a book about Danny.  It’s a book about Lydia.

But, the more I talk about the book and answer questions about the book, the less dogmatic I become about this issue, for a couple of reasons.

One, I’ve discovered that writing about a missing person naturally turns a book into a missing person story.  It’s like including a tsunami or a school shooting in a book.  These are such naturally dramatic and life-changing events–so extraordinary–they end up fully informing the universe of the story.  And that is undeniably true of the The Local News.  While I didn’t write a play-by-play of all of the procedures and minutia that accompany the nitty-gritty details of a missing person case, Danny’s disappearance informs every event, every scene and every relationship in the novel.

And two, even more importantly, what begins as a device on page one did not remain a device for me by page 357.    Though I told myself this was never Danny’s story–and Lydia did remain my central focus for the entire writing process–I did come to deeply care about him over the course of writing this book.  After all, I spent two years with him; I discovered his history, his vulnerabilities, what made him tick.  And so I came to care about what happened to him.  I cared about the efforts to find him.  I cared about the outcome of his disappearance.  At the start of the first draft, he was just a bully Lydia was happy enough to be free of.  By the end of the final draft, he lived and breathed in my mind as much as any of the other characters did.

There’s a part of me that still doesn’t consider The Local News to be a “missing person” story.  Or maybe it’s more accurate to say I don’t consider it to be solely a missing person story.  Yes, there’s a missing person at the center of it.  But there’s also this achy, uncertain, bristling teenage girl at the center of it.  And she is who held my interest; she’s who brought me back to the blank page each day.  Perhaps it’s a little silly to frame it as an either/or.  Perhaps I’m guilty of what Lydia and Danny were guilty of as teenagers: creating sibling rivalry where there needn’t be any.  There’s no reason why a book can’t be both about a missing boy and the coming of age of a girl, all at once.  And I suppose that’s what I hope for mine.

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Win a Copy of The Local News (enter by July 10th at noon PST)

]]> http://www.caribousmom.com/2009/07/08/guest-post-miriam-gershow/feed/ 4 http://www.caribousmom.com/2009/06/15/tlc-book-tour-cathy-holton/ http://www.caribousmom.com/2009/06/15/tlc-book-tour-cathy-holton/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:51:44 +0000 Caribousmom http://www.caribousmom.com/?p=4089 Cathy Holton is the author of two previous novels: Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes AND Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes.

Holton’s third novel, Beach Trip, was released in May through Ballantine Books. I thoroughly enjoyed this Southern women’s novel set in the Outer Banks of North Carolina (read my review).

To read more about Holton and her work, visit the author’s website.

Read the author’s blog: Surly Wench Journal.

I was thrilled when Cathy agreed to write a guest post about women’s friendships for this tour. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did!

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Guest Post by Author Cathy Holton

I’m always fascinated by the relationships between women.  We speak a very complicated language, subtle yet telling; often what we don’t say is as important as what we do.  I’ve found that as I grow older my relationships with other women have grown deeper, richer, more meaningful on so many levels. We’re bonded by our experiences; we’ve raised families, lost or gained husbands, started new careers, overcome illness, tragedy and the occasional run of bad luck.  We’ve learned to speak our minds openly, no longer avoiding conflict for the sake of ‘being nice.’

I knew that Beach Trip would be the story of four well educated, but very different, women; suite mates in college who, had they met later in life, might not have been friends at all.  I was curious to see whether their shared experiences as young women, and the lives they had led since then, the choices they had made, would sustain a twenty-seven year friendship.

I knew the novel would have an element of dark humor, and I knew there would be a surprising revelation at the end, something that threatened the tenuous bond the women had shared over the years, and yet helped to explain that bond, too.

I recently received an email from a woman who has spent the last seventy-three years getting together annually with five friends from kindergarten.  Imagine that!  Seventy-three years of friendship….I like to think that Mel, Sara, Annie and Lola will be similarly blessed.

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Lilia awakens one night when she is seven years old and finds her father waiting for her outside in the snow. She walks out of her home and into his arms. What follows is a life of constant travel – moving from place to place with the sensation of being hunted, changing identities, and an inability to create lasting relationships.When Lilia meets Eli, a young man studying dead and dying languages in New York City, she knows she will eventually leave him. But when she does just that, the act puts in motion a series of events which will not only change Lilia’s life, but the lives of those around her.

Fifteen years later in another country Lilia pressed her forehead against a windowpane in Eli’s apartment, looking out at an uncharted landscape of Brooklyn rooftops in the rain, and came to a somewhat unsettling conclusion: she’d been disappearing for so long that she didn’t know how to stay. – from Last Night In Montreal, page 9 -

Last Night In Montreal is a novel which intersects the lives of four flawed characters: Lilia, scarred by events she cannot remember but from which she constantly flees; Eli, stuck in one place and unable to move forward until he becomes obsessed with Lilia; Christopher, the private investigator who gives up everything to find a missing child and uncover the mystery of her disappearance; and Michaela, Christopher’s daughter who is abandoned by her parents and haunted by a girl she only knows through her father’s notes. The mystery surrounding Lilia’s abduction serves as the focal point from which the other characters’ stories revolve. As they are all drawn into Lilia’s life, they are forced to come to terms with their own weaknesses, desires, and fears. Thematically, the story is one about loss, repressed memory, family secrets and identity.

Lilia is a complex character whose life is not her own. She has no recollection of her years before the abduction and seems unable to stop traveling – a compulsion which allows her to see the world and yet not be a part of it.

She moved over the surface of life the way figure skaters move, fast and choreographed, but she never broke through the ice, she never pierced the surface and descended into those awful beautiful waters, she was never submerged and she never learned to swim in those currents, these current: all the shadows and light and splendorous horrors that make up the riptides of life on earth. – from Last Night In Montreal, page 119 -

Last Night in Montreal is Emily St. John Mandel’s first novel, and it is a stunning debut. Told from multiple viewpoints and moving back and forth between the present and past, the book is compulsively readable. Mandel’s writing is flawless – poetic, compelling, and achingly beautiful. Perhaps the strongest aspect of Mandel’s prose is her ability to fully develop her characters – people who are adrift and searching and often in pain, but who attract the reader’s empathy and admiration despite their weaknesses.

Last Night In Montreal is one of those books which once started cannot be laid aside. Disturbing and dark at times, it is a novel which will haunt the reader long after it is completed.

Highly recommended.

To read more about this book, including an excerpt, visit the Unbridled Books website.

To learn more about Emily St. John Mandel and her work, visit the author’s website.

More reviews of this book:

Feminist Review

The Word Hoarder

Violet Crush

Booksie’s Blog

Passion For The Page

Educating Petunia

She Reads and Reads

Bookfoolery and Babble

Musings of A Bookish Kitty

S. Krishna’s Books

The Laws of Harmony by Judith Ryan Hendricks
Harper Paperbacks; 1 edition – February 10, 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0061687365
496 pages

I recently read The Laws of Harmony – the latest novel by Judi Ryan Hendricks – and loved it (read my review). Hendricks has a way of drawing her reader into the story, of making them feel like they know the characters. I asked Hendricks if she would write a guest post for Caribousmom and she readily agreed. When I read this post it resonated with me as a writer and as a reader…I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

Of Bread and Books

by Judith Ryan Hendricks

Bread, as any baker will testify, is a process—slow, arduous, messy, unpredictable.  The French, of course, have a saying about it:  To be a boulanger, they say, you must be big, strong and dumb—big to carry sacks of flour, strong to knead the dough, and dumb to work so hard.

As with most French sayings, there’s a germ of truth at its heart.  You don’t make bread because you want to get rich.  You don’t make bread for prestige or fame or even respect—although those things may come collaterally.  But the real and only reason you make bread is because you have to.  You make bread because you can’t not make it.

By changing a few words here and there, you can say the same about writing.  Writers don’t have to be big or strong, I suppose, although it helps if you can carry a six-pound manuscript in one hand and heft your computer bag into the overhead bins on airplanes with the other.

But you could definitely make a case for being dumb.  Why else would you sit alone in a small office all day, everyday for four years—missing dentist appointments, letting your mother leave messages on voice mail, forgetting to eat lunch, ignoring the dog while she nibbles the Tibetan rug?  Why else would you subject your book to the slings and arrows of hostile reviewers, drag yourself around the country to signings where you sometimes find yourself reading to the bookstore staff and a couple of transients who just came for the refreshments?

Why?  See above.  The only reason you write is because you have to.  You write because you can’t not write.

My career as a novelist began in a bakery.  Appropriately so, I’ve decided, because the longer I go at both baking and writing, the more similarities I see between them.

Bread is basically the fusion of four of the earth’s most elemental ingredients—flour, water, yeast, salt.  In the kneading there’s an exchange of energy between baker and bread—and you learn to know by touch the exact moment when the dough comes alive.

A book also has some pretty basic ingredients—character, setting, plot.  You manipulate them, work them together until they fuse and the story takes on a life of its own.  And you know when that happens, too.

To bake bread is to understand that yeast is a living entity, and it may or may not always do what you expect or want it to do.  If you persist at the craft long enough, you learn to let go of your expectations, forget about the outcome and let the bread direct you.

Likewise, there comes a time in the writing process—usually just when you think you know exactly where the story should go next—that you find yourself writing something—and suddenly the character seems to be glaring at you off the page.  You can almost hear a voice saying, That’s ridiculous.  I’d never do that.

You learn very quickly that the process works best if you let your characters take you by the hand and lead you into the story.  This is where the messy part comes in, and sometimes you end up in a game of dominoes.  Changing one thing, and finding that it alters everything down the line.  Or having to backtrack to rearrange all the events leading up to it.

Creation—whether of bread, or of a book—is an imperfect, spontaneous, organic and on-going process.  We aren’t the originators and we don’t have ultimate control, but sometimes we’re lucky enough to be present.  We’re able to tap into the process, to assist at the birth.

And that’s enough.

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To read more about Judi Hendricks and her work, visit the author’s website.

Read Judi Hendricks’ blog: The Kitchen Table

Visit other blogs touring this book and read their reviews.

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