The Barefoot Believers, by Annie Jones

The Barefoot Believers is a light and engaging Christian novel about two sisters whose lifelong rivalry comes to a head in midlife when they find themselves stranded together at their family’s old vacation home, each with an injury that restricts mobility, forced to rely on and put up with each other. While there, one sister rediscovers an old love interest, and the other sister discovers a new one. Plus, they manage to solve the mystery of the baby sister their dad abducted when they were young. All in about a week.

It’s a great premise, although the pacing is a bit uneven, the coincidences often too contrived, and the writing fairly pedestrian (as is all too often the case in much genre fiction, not just inspirational romance). As a light beach read for someone who likes her romance flavoured with Christian values, it’s not bad at all, although I can’t help wishing that with these characters and this set-up, the author could have done something much more interesting.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver

I’ve been meaning to read this one for awhile. I’m not sure why.  I have all kinds of issues with people who tell me I should do more for the environment, especially if it involves changing my eating habits.  I’ve blogged about this already and I will blog some more about it in the near future, based on the thinking I’ve done about this book.  To make a long story short here, let’s say that although I am fascinated by the concept of being a locavore (one who eats only food grown or raised in one’s immediate local area) I’m unlikely to become one anytime soon, for a variety of reasons.

However, it was Barbara Kingsolver herself (in her essay collection, Small Wonder), who introduced me to this whole idea, and as it’s since become trendy in so many quarters, I was interested to read what she had to say about her own family’s experience with this experiment.  Besides, whether she’s writing fiction or non-fiction, Barbara Kingsolver is just a very engaging and readable author, so I knew I’d have a good time no matter what I thought about her experiment.

Good Grief, by Lolly Winston

Good Grief was another one of those serendipitous judging-a-book-by-its-cover library discoveries I was very happy to have made.  In one of Anne Lamott’s books she talks about going to a library during her father’s illness and looking for the funny books about cancer — and getting a strange look.  I think you’d get the same response if you looked for the funny books about grief, but Good Grief is a very funny, and also very real, fictional exploration of one young widow’s journey through grief.

Sophie is thirty-six when her husband Ethan dies of cancer, and rather than sliding beatifically through grief as she had imagined doing, Sophie finds her life falling apart as she slides into depression — and then manages to crawl back out and cobble together a new life for herself.  What makes the story funny and engaging is Sophie’s voice, which is so strong and true and likable that you really feel for her when, in the depths of her depression, she goes to work at her PR job wearing a bathrobe and bunny slippers — knowing, somehow, that this isn’t the right thing to do, but not sure how to correct the problem

In the later part of the book, when Sophie is rebuilding her new life in a new town, there are a few parts that stretched credibility with coincidences that just seemed too neat, but the story never became fairy-tale-like or ridiculous.  It was always an enjoyable read and one that kept me turning pages right to the end.

The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta

There are books I plan to read, books that are recommended to me or that I catch a review of, like the five or six books currently on my “Want to Read” list on Facebook’s Visual Bookshelf. Then there are books that I’ve never heard of, that catch my eye entirely by accident, often as I walk into the library. Don’t judge a book by its cover? Don’t be so foolish. If the title and cover aren’t catchy, I might never pick up the book. And God bless the people who make up the displays at the front door of the library, because without them a lot of good books might never have fallen into my hands. Like this one.

The Abstinence Teacher is a story that brings the right/left religion and culture wars in contemporary America down to the personal level. Ruth is a middle-aged, divorced teacher whose approach to teaching sex ed to teenagers is liberal: she believes that pleasure is good, shame is bad, and knowledge is power. All that changes when her class becomes controversial and, under pressure from a group of conservative evangelicals, she is forced to teach an “abstinence only” curriculum that goes against everything she believes.

But it’s also the story of Tim, a member of that conservative evangelical church who truly and genuinely believes that Jesus saved him from a life that was going down the tubes fast. Tim and Ruth are thrown into conflict when he leads her daughter’s soccer team (he’s the coach) in a spontaneous prayer session, and an enraged Ruth hauls her daughter off the soccer field.

Whistling in the Dark, by Lesley Kagen

Whistling in the Dark is the story of Sally and Troo, two pre-adolescent sisters growing up in a working-class Milwaukee neighbourhood in the late 1950s. Behind the usual nostalgia for childhood in a simpler time is a dark shadow: two young girls have been molested and murdered in the neighbourhood in the last year, and little girls like Sally and Troo are living in fear. And their home life is no refuge: their daddy is dead; their mom is in hospital, possibly dying, and their new stepfather is worse than useless — he’s gone most of the time and drunk when he’s home.

The story is narrated in Sally’s engaging and believable (though occasionally slightly too-cute) voice. Kagen does a great job of presenting the naive child narrator dealing with very adult topics and allowing the reader to see what’s really happening more clearly than Sally herself does. Both major and minor characters are well-drawn and the story moves along quickly to a heartwarming conclusion.

The Turning, by Tim Winton

The Turning is another of the books that was recommended and given to me while I was in Australia. Before I even opened the cover I had to overcome two of my deep-seated prejudices: I’m resistant to fiction by men (despite numerous great examples to the contrary), and I generally don’t enjoy short stories. But this collection of short stories by an Australian male writer came so highly recommended that I went ahead and picked it up.

I was hooked almost immediately by the strong and believable voice of the first story’s narrator. Though narrators and characters changed from story to story, the book continued to grab me and keep me reading. Every story is beautifully crafted, every character flawed yet sympathetic, and almost every word perfect. This is literary fiction at its best — writing that is beautiful in and of itself, but doesn’t draw attention to itself: the focus is always on the characters, their stories, and the world they live in.

Testament, by Nino Ricci

Testament is a gorgeously written re-telling of the story of Jesus of Nazareth — not the story of the divine Son of God, but of a compelling and complex human being in first-century Galilee. The story is told in four parts from the perspective of four different characters — Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Jesus, and an extra-Biblical character of the author’s own invention, Simon of Gergesa. Each of these characters had a very different relationship with Jesus and, as with the four Gospels, the four different stories reveal different facets of Jesus’ character, not always agreeing with each other but adding up to an intriguing whole.

Testament is not Biblical fiction for the faint of heart — by which I mean it’s not for those devout believers who don’t like seeing the Biblical text questioned or challenged. It’s somewhat in the vein of The Red Tent in the sense of subverting the “official” story, only this is even more challenging than The Red Tent because it touches on the story at the heart of the Christian faith — the life of Jesus, and even more specifically His death and resurrection.

The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, by Joshilyn Jackson

Once again, with her third novel, the fabulous Joshilyn Jackson has not let me down.  Jackson, a Southern U.S. writer (and amazingly funny blogger, at Faster than Kudzu), is the perfect balance between a literary and popular writer — her prose is thoughtful and beautifully crafted, but it never gets in the way of the story and characters that keep you turning pages till the end.
 
Once again, Jackson returns to the world of what some people describe as “Southern Gothic” — a mysterious death in a Florida suburb, which leads to the unveiling of buried family secrets and further acts of violence and desperation.  But her home territory as a novelist is not just the South, but the geography of family relationships — the bonds that unite and sometimes divide mother and daughter, sister and sister, husband and wife.

Seven Types of Ambiguity, by Elliot Perlman

Before leaving Australia I was given a small (but heavy, for a person who only travels with carry-on) packet of Australian fiction so that I would have the opportunity to learn a little about the literature of the country in which I’d just spent two weeks.  One of the books included in the package was Seven Types of Ambiguity, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award (the Aussie version of our Giller or GG — in fact, given the money involved, it’s more like their version of the Giller PLUS the GG).
 
Perlman steals the title from a work of literary criticism with which his main character, Simon, is a little obsessed. Simon is a little obsessive anyway, and I’m not sure it’s even accurate to call him the main character of the novel, but the 600+ page story centres around an impulsive (and stupid) act by which Simon attempts to win back the attention of his ex-girlfriend Anna, who has long since left him, moved on to someone else, married and had a child.  Ten years after their relationship, Simon — an unemployed, brilliant but directionless ex-teacher — can’t move on. And when he does make a move, his action has consequences for Anna, for her husband, for Simon’s psychiatrist, for Simon’s hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold girlfriend, and of course for Simon himself. And for a couple of other random people who are basically needed to make up the number seven.

The Woman at the Well, by Patty Froese Ntihemuka

In my endless quest for good Biblical fiction I picked up this novel about a Biblical character I haven’t read a book about before: the Samaritan woman who meets Jesus at the well in John, chapter 4.  On the one hand, the author seems to have had her work cut out for her in spinning the tale of a woman with only one brief Biblical appearance out into a book-length narrative.  On the other hand, the woman’s brief bio as encapsulated by Jesus: “The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband” (John 4:18), practically cries out to be expanded into a longer story.

Patty Froese Ntihemuka has done a good job with this story, making her main character, whom she names Nilloufar, believable and sympathetic.  The research is excellent and the setting comes vividly to life. The book is, perhaps, a little too short, so that in places the author resorts to telling rather than showing, especially towards the end.  However, in just 156 pages she has managed to make not only the woman at the well but each of her five husbands, her lover, her sister-in-law and her best friend into real and rounded characters, which is quite a feat.  This novel does a particularly good job of giving us a sense of the multicultural flavour of Israel and Samaria in the time of Jesus, where a Greco-Roman culture exists alongside the more traditional Jewish culture and religion — Nilloufar’s best friend is a slave woman, Pia, who insists that a woman really needs a goddess like those of the Greeks.  Little touches like this helped me feel like I was really getting a glimpse into another place and time, as well as into the life of a real woman whose life was touched by the Man at the well.