Fires in the Dark - Doughty, Louise

Rating:
BN: 6

Amazon: 4

Fires In the Dark reveals the highly secretive and misunderstood world of the coppersmith gypsies.

In 1927, when prosperity still reigns in Central Europe, Yenko is born to two Coppersmith Gypsies. His parents, Josef and Anna, are nomads who raise their son during the relative calm of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Soon, though, dangerous times threaten to unsettle their family, as their heritage makes them vulnerable targets for ethnic cleansing. As Germany invades Czechoslovakia and the conflicts of World War II begin to unfold, Yenko and his parents become fugitives, forced on a journey that promises only great uncertainty and offers survival as a remote possibility. In the course of their flight, the burden of an ancient tradition rests entirely on Yenko's shoulders.

In capturing the desperation and perseverance of one family during an extraordinary time in history, Louise Doughty pays powerful homage to an insular and little-known culture.

A Woman's Place - Delinsky, Barbara

Ratings:

BN: 5

Amazon: 4.5

Everything Claire Raphael has she's earned. On her own. The hard way. She built her part-time business up from nothing and made it successful through her imagination, creativity and hard work. She has two great children and Dennis, a husband she loves completely. Then, one evening, when Claire returns from a difficult business trip, Dennis hands her divorce papers along with a court order to vacate their house. And he's taking custody of the children. Claire is devestated. She had no idea her marriage was on the brink of disaster, that Dennis had been planning this ambush for weeks, if not months or that her hectic but happy life was about to come crumbling down around her. Claire doesn't know where to turn or whom to trust. But in a few short weeks she learns what so many women have had to discover -- that when the going gets tough, a woman's as tough as she needs to be..

Somebody Else's Daughter - Brundage, Elizabeth

Ratings:

BN: 4

Amazon: 4.5

Brundage's second novel concerns ugly secrets that lie beneath the glossy veneer of a wealthy town and popular school in the Berkshires, waiting to be exposed by three new arrivals: a sculptor, her son and a writing teacher who gave up his daughter for adoption many years ago. Thrillers often make great audiobooks, because they offer frequent heart-stopping twists and turns. But this literary thriller, with its careful, delicate writing and a slow buildup to a powerful, sudden—and fairly predictable—denouement, is less suited to audio. Despite Bernadette Dunne's considerable efforts, the reading drags from time to time. Mark Bramhall only voices the prologue; the remainder of the book belongs to Dunne, who ably evokes both genders and is particularly skilled with New England accents. Despite the slowness of the story and patience required of the reader, this is a satisfying audio experience. A Viking hardcover (Reviews, May 26). (Aug.)

"Students, parents, teachers, townies: Somebody Else's Daughter is a deft balancing act of taut plot and richly drawn characters struggling to find their moral centers as they grope in the dark for the transformative power of love. I didn't so much read this novel as devour it. Brundage is a storyteller supreme."-- Wally Lamb, author of I Know This Much Is True and The Hour I First Believed

Sarah's Daughter - Bass, Ruth

Ratings:
BN: None
Amazon: 4.5

Rose begins to think of her mother as "Sarah" because the very word "mother" makes her cry. She continually asks herself what her mother would do about breakfast for the family; about how to take care of her siblings; about her father's drinking and going off to a hotel almost every evening.

After the unusual accident that killed her mother, fourteen-year-old Rose Hibbard copes. She is forced to take on her silently grieving father and her younger brother and sister. Without a role model of her own, she becomes one for her eight-year-old sister. She makes breakfast, gets everyone started for the day, does the washing and ironing and sewing, and still manages to get to school and do her own homework.

Interspersed with Rose's moments of panic or despair are warm hours shared with her friends, Alice and Emily, who listen and help and have fun with her; times familiar to most American teenagers today. As are the nights she stares at the moon and wishes on stars, as well as her developing romance with young Newton Barnes.

Just when Rose thinks her family will find a way to manage without a mother, her father says she will have to leave school for good in the spring. Her teacher is her main adult ally. School is where she is happiest and feels most comfortable, where life feels almost normal for someone her age. The one thing that has kept her going, giving her the will to take care of everyone and stay awake in class is her lifelong dream of becoming a teacher, and it disappears in a matter of seconds.

Her brother and sister often sneak off to cry at their mother's grave, and Rose's father, unable to face his own loss, becomes increasingly gruff andsilent. She overhears a gossipy neighbor saying something about her father being "at the drink." And when she comes home early one day and discovers her father, his trousers in a heap on the floor, laughing in her parents' bedroom with a half-clothed woman, she flees to the woodshed where she hopes the restacked cords of wood will fall on her, just as they had crushed her mother.

This story, which takes place in late 19th century New England, focuses on a typical American teenage girl for whom cooking on a wood stove, pumping water, emptying chamber pots, reading by kerosene lamps and heating flatirons on the stove to do the ironing is the norm. But it is Rose's ability to deal with the death of her mother, her father's alcoholism and her distraught siblings, her stellar performance in school and her growth from child to girl-woman, her friendship with her teacher, and the responsibility she feels to care for her siblings, that shows us the depth and character of this fourteen-year-old young woman.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Barbery, Muriel

Ratings:
BN: 3
Amazon: 4

Hedgehogs aren't native to America, but you don't have to be French to sniff out at least some of the contradictions in the title of Muriel Barbery's European bestseller. Her novel both depicts and hopes to appeal to the connoisseur of humanity who can appreciate exquisite qualities unacknowledged by others. One of her two Parisian diarist heroines is a concierge, the other a suicidal adolescent. They sound conventional, but that's precisely the point: they both work very hard to achieve stereotypicality. As the frumpy concierge Renée says, "I correspond so very well to what social prejudice has collectively construed to be a typical French concierge that I am one of the multiple cogs that make the great universal illusion turn, the illusion according to which life has a meaning that can be easily deciphered." From her position as a teenager, Paloma casts a jaundiced eye: "In our world...you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult,...it is wobbly and ephemeral, so fragile, cloaking despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe."

2009 Jan Selection List

In Order by Author's Last Name:


1. The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (Baker, Tiffany)

2. The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Barbery, Muriel)

3. Sarah’s Daughter (Bass, Ruth)

4. Somebody Else's Daughter (Brundage, Elizabeth)

5. A Woman's Place (Delinsky, Barbara)

6. Fires in the Dark (Doughty, Louise)

7. The 19th Wife: A Novel (Ebershoff, David)

8. Outlander (Gabaldon, Diana)

9. The Cellist of Sarajevo (Galloway, Steven)

10. Still Alice (Genova, Lisa)

11. The Hearts of Horses (Gloss, Molly)

12. Hidden (Gray, Shelly)

13. Uprising (Haddix, Margret)

14. Matrimony (Henkin, Josua)

15. The Kite Runner (Hosseini, Khaled)

16. Snow Mountain Passage (Houston, James)

17. Mudbound (Jordan, Hillary)

18. Lady of Milkweed Manor (Klassen, Julie)

19. The Shape of Mercy (Meissner, Susan)

20. Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World (Myron, Vicky)

21. Tomato Girl (Pupek, Jayne)

22. Lovely Bones (Sebold, Alice)

23. Fireflies in December (Valent, Jennifer Erin)

24. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (Wroblewski, David)

25. The Shack (Young, William P)

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County - Baker, Tiffany

Ratings:
BN 4.5
Amazon 4

Synopsis
When Truly Plaice's mother was pregnant, the town of Aberdeen joined together in betting how recordbreakingly huge the baby boy would ultimately be. The girl who proved to be Truly paid the price of her enormity; her father blamed her for her mother's death in childbirth, and was totally ill equipped to raise either this giant child or her polar opposite sister Serena Jane, the epitome of femine perfection. When he, too, relinquished his increasingly tenuous grip on life, Truly and Serena Jane are separated--Serena Jane to live a life of privilege as the future May Queen and Truly to live on the outskirts of town on the farm of the town sadsack, the subject of constant abuse and humiliation at the hands of her peers.





Serena Jane's beauty proves to be her greatest blessing and her biggest curse, for it makes her the obsession of classmate Bob Bob Morgan, the youngest in a line of Robert Morgans who have been doctors in Aberdeen for generations. Though they have long been the pillars of the community, the earliest Robert Morgan married the town witch, Tabitha Dyerson, and the location of her fabled shadow book--containing mysterious secrets for healing and darker powers--has been the subject of town gossip ever since. Bob Bob Morgan, one of Truly's biggest tormentors, does the unthinkable to claim the prize of Serena Jane, and changes the destiny of all Aberdeen from there on.





When Serena Jane flees town and a loveless marriage to Bob Bob, it is Truly who must become the woman of a house that she did not choose and mother to her eight-year-old nephew Bobbie. Truly's brother-in-law is relentless and brutal; he criticizes her physique and the limitations of her healthas a result, and degrades her more than any one human could bear. It is only when Truly finds her calling--the ability to heal illness with herbs and naturopathic techniques--hidden within the folds of Robert Morgan's family quilt, that she begins to regain control over her life and herself. Unearthed family secrets, however, will lead to the kind of betrayal that eventually break the Morgan family apart forever, but Truly's reckoning with her own demons allows for both an uprooting of Aberdeen County, and the possibility of love in unexpected places.