Tracey L. Garvis Graves : On the Island - Excellent read and very thoughfully written!

On the Island [Paperback]

Ms. Tracey L. Garvis Graves (Author)

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“The relationship between Anna and TJ was sweet and sexy and very real...the idea of their age difference was neither a shock nor unbelievable. The bonds created between individuals under duress are strong and enduring. And the romantic in me loved it as well. ” - Cricket, Mostly Fantasy

“The hero is perfect. The heroine is perfect. They are human and flawed and make mistakes but when I say they're perfect, I mean that I really LOVED them as characters, as people. It's rare to read a character that's genuinely good. Inherently good with nothing to dislike about them. ” - SunFlowers

“Who can resist a "stranded on a deserted island" story?! This one did not disappoint. The progression of the relationship between Anna and T.J. was very honest, honorable, and beliveable--and respectable. It was a wonderful story that held my attention throughout the book. This book has plenty to make it a good book club discussion.” - Vicki Moran

In 1914, Joey, a beautiful bay-red foal with a distinctive cross on his nose, is sold to the army and thrust into the midst of the war on the Western Front. With his officer, he charges toward the enemy, witnessing the horror of the battles in France. But even in the desolation of the trenches, Joey's courage touches the soldiers around him and he is able to find warmth and hope. But his heart aches for Albert, the farmer's son he left behind. Will he ever see his true master again?

When thirty-year-old English teacher Anna Emerson is offered a job tutoring T.J. Callahan at his family's summer rental in the Maldives, she accepts without hesitation; a working vacation on a tropical island trumps the library any day.

T.J. Callahan has no desire to leave town, not that anyone asked him. He's almost seventeen and if having cancer wasn't bad enough, now he has to spend his first summer in remission with his family - and a stack of overdue assignments - instead of his friends.

Anna and T.J. are en route to join T.J.'s family in the Maldives when the pilot of their seaplane suffers a fatal heart attack and crash-lands in the Indian Ocean. Adrift in shark-infested waters, their life jackets keep them afloat until they make it to the shore of an uninhabited island. Now Anna and T.J. just want to survive and they must work together to obtain water, food, fire, and shelter. Their basic needs might be met but as the days turn to weeks, and then months, the castaways encounter plenty of other obstacles, including violent tropical storms, the many dangers lurking in the sea, and the possibility that T.J.'s cancer could return. As T.J. celebrates yet another birthday on the island, Anna begins to wonder if the biggest challenge of all might be living with a boy who is gradually becoming a man.

"On the Island is a clever, captivating story. The characters will live in your thoughts long after you turn the last page." ~ Meira Pentermann, author of Firefly Beach

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Review

This was a very light, and easy read and I found myself wanting more when I knew that it was coming to a close. I read this book in about 12 hours, and even in that short time I found myself invested in the characters of Anna and TJ. This is one of those books where you cannot judge it by it's cover or by it's sleeve description. You have to let yourself go and overlook the age gap very early on, because it's not about their relationship in the romantic sense. This is a story about survival and human nature and how these two seemingly different people lean on each other, come to trust one another and depend on one another so that they can survive on a deserted island.

If you want to believe that people are genuinely good, and can genuinely care about one another, then this is a good piece of light fiction that you can get hooked on very quickly. I started this one evening and finished it the following day. It's a quick read. My one complaint is that the author doesn't go into enough details with the characters. I found myself wanting more internal dialogue on each of their parts, what they were thinking about each other and about their situation. There were parts in the book where they were fighting for their lives and I just didn't feel it - they should have been more terrified and it was a little bit of a let down. I think that with some more character developments and internal dialogue, I would have become more attached to them. This is also a very good first book for an author. - Lindsay Carpenter (Collegeville, PA United States)

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About the Author

Tracey Garvis-Graves lives in a suburb of Des Moines, Iowa with her husband, two children, and hyper dog Chloe. This is her first novel. She blogs at www.traceygarvisgraves.com using colorful language and a snarky sense of humor to write about pop culture, silly television shows, and her suburban neighborhood. She is hard at work on her next book. You can e-mail her at traceygarvisgraves@yahoo.com. She'd love to hear from you.

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Outstanding! One of the best book club reads ever! : Perfect Peace by Daniel Black

Perfect Peace [Hardcover]

By

Daniel Black

"The heartbreaking portrait of a large, rural southern family’s attempt to grapple with their mother’s desperate decision to make her newborn son into the daughter she will never have."

When the seventh child of the Peace family, named Perfect, turns eight, her mother Emma Jean tells her bewildered daughter, “You was born a boy. I made you a girl. But that ain’t what you was supposed to be. So, from now on, you gon’ be a boy. It’ll be a little strange at first, but you’ll get used to it, and this’ll be over after while.” From this point forward, his life becomes a bizarre kaleidoscope of events. Meanwhile, the Peace family is forced to question everything they thought they knew about gender, sexuality, unconditional love, and fulfillment.

When Emma Jean was a child, she was abused mentally and physically by her mean-spirited mother. She couldn't understand why her mother went to such great lengths to hate her but shamelessly showered her two older sisters with the love and the attention she craved.

Emma Jean marries Gustavus "Gus" Peace and from their union six sons are born. Pregnant with number seven, Emma Jean feels deep in her heart she will be blessed with a girl; a daughter she will love and cherish, unlike the way she was treated as a child. As fate will have it, she gives birth to a son; a beautiful son she will easily disguise as a girl and name Perfect. For eight years, sweet, adorable Perfect was the apple of her brothers' eyes and her parents' pride and joy. However, Emma Jean and Perfect's world is shattered when Perfect's true identity is discovered. Perfect's name is changed to Paul and he is forced to start living his life as a boy.



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Review

Undeniably the most creative writing I've ever read in this genre. The characterization and story line are amazing! Particularly amazing is the setting for this book -- that is what made it possible for Emma Jean to create a "Perfect." Daniel Black is an extremely talented writer -- I wait on the edge of my seat for his next book.

Reviewed by: Pat Black

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About the author

Daniel Black is a native of Kansas City, Kansas, yet spent the majority of his childhood years in Blackwell, Arkansas. He is an associate professor at his alma mater, Clark Atlanta University, where he now aims to provide an example to young Americans of the importance of self-knowledge and communal committment. He is the author ofThey Tell Me of a Home and The Sacred Place.

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Colorful, fast-paced and filled with clever plot twists: The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly

The Lincoln Lawyer: A Novel [Kindle Edition]

By

Michael Connelly

Product Description


This #1 bestselling legal thriller from Michael Connelly is a stunning display of novelistic mastery - as human, as gripping, and as whiplash-surprising as any novel yet from the writer Publishers Weekly has called "today's Dostoevsky of crime literature."

Mickey Haller is a Lincoln Lawyer, a criminal defense attorney who operates out of the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car, traveling between the far-flung courthouses of Los Angeles to defend clients of every kind. Bikers, con artists, drunk drivers, drug dealers - they're all on Mickey Haller's client list. For him, the law is rarely about guilt or innocence, it's about negotiation and manipulation. Sometimes it's even about justice.

A Beverly Hills playboy arrested for attacking a woman he picked up in a bar chooses Haller to defend him, and Mickey has his first high-paying client in years. It is a defense attorney's dream, what they call a franchise case. And as the evidence stacks up, Haller comes to believe this may be the easiest case of his career. Then someone close to him is murdered and Haller discovers that his search for innocence has brought him face-to-face with evil as pure as a flame. To escape without being burned, he must deploy every tactic, feint, and instinct in his arsenal - this time to save his own life.

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Review

I first started being a fan of Michael Connelly after I read his novel, "Nine Dragon's" part of the Harry Bosche series. This novel was not a disappointment at all and was a definite page turner. I could have read it in one sitting if only I had the time. The book is about a defense lawyer, Mickey Haller, who is hired by a man who was accused of assaulting and trying murder a women who was known to be a prostitute. He completely denies these charges and tells a story of how he was set up so that the women could then sue him for damages and win big since he was from a very wealthy family. By the end of the book, Mickey Haller himself is suspected of murder! There are many twists in this novel that keep you very interested throughout the entire book unlike some which you may lose interest midway through. You will not want to put this book down!

Reviewed by: Chris (Boston, MA)

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About the author

Michael Connelly (born July 21, 1956, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American author of detective novels, notably those featuring Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch. Bosch, named after the Dutch painter of the same name, is the protagonist of a series of Connelly's novels. The character is an LAPD detective. The Black Echo, the first book featuring Bosch, won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for Best First Novel of 1992.

Connelly has written other books outside the Bosch series, including Blood Work, which was made into a 2002 movie directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. In 2006, The Lincoln Lawyer was selected as one of ten books to feature in Richard and Judy's televised book club. Connelly is a graduate of the University of Florida, where he earned a bachelors degree in journalism. In addition to his books, Connelly has written for television.


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The extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar [Paperback]

By

Sylvia Plath

Product Description


A vulnerable young girl wins a dream assignment on a big-time New York fashion magazine and finds herself plunged into a nightmare. An autobiographical account of Sylvia Plath's own mental breakdown and suicide attempt, The Bell Jar is more than a confessional novel, it is a comic but painful statement of what happens to a woman's aspirations in a society that refuses to take them seriously... a society that expects electroshock to cure the despair of a sensitive, questioning young artist whose search for identity becomes a terrifying descent toward madness.

The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature. Originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963--only a month before the author's suicide--Sylvia Plath's harrowing autobiographical novel traces a young woman's descent into an emotional breakdown. The brilliant and disturbing story of Esther Greenwood's journey from the glamorous world of magazine publishing in New York to the isolating world of the asylum has become one of the most famous books of the late twentieth century, and still has all its power to shock and move us.

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Review

I reread the Bell Jar every couple of years and have done so since I was 18. It's so much more than a morbid ride or a thinly-veiled autobiography. It's one of few great coming-of-age stories that we have as women. I've long since stopped reading this book as a glimpse into Sylvia's soul or coming suicide. I've also stopped reading it as a precursor to the coming feminist movement of the 1960s. I'm drawn back to it again and again because it's simply a well-told story. It's subtle, complex and occasionally very very funny.

Reviewed by: Viola Alvarez

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About the author

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England, having two children together: Frieda and Nicholas. Following a long struggle with depression and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963. Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy.

Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two collections The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.


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Perfect Board Books for Little Ones: A Little Books Boxed Set Featuring Little Pea, Little Hoot, Little Oink

A Little Books Boxed Set Featuring Little Pea, Little Hoot, Little Oink

By Amy Krouse Rosenthal

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Product Description
Three adorable characters in three adorable board books! These clever twists on dinnertime, bedtime, and clean-up time will delight all the little mess-makers, picky eaters, and night owls in your life.

Review
This set contains three books: //Little Pea//, //Little Hoot//, and //Little Oink//. Little Hoot is a young owl who is told to stay up much past his bedtime, because that is what owls are supposed to do. Little Oink is a piglet who likes things clean and orderly but is told to mess his room up. Little Pea hates having to eat candy for dinner and would much rather eat spinach. Each main character breaks their stereotypical mold.

This is a set of books that belongs on every infant and preschool-aged child's bookshelf. This would also make a wonderful baby shower gift. These stories are absolutely adorable! Amy Krouse Rosenthal's writing is whimsical and perfect for the targeted age group. Jen Corace's illustrations are darling and playful. This set is something I am definitely saving for the day I have my own children.-- Jen LeBrun "Sacramento Book Review" (Sacramento, CA)


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Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom Series: Carpe Demon, California Demon, Demons Are Forever, Deja Demon, Demon Ex Machina

Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom Series

#1: Carpe Demon: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom When minions of hell infest her small California town, retired demon-hunter Kate Connor's the busiest soccer mom on the block. Read more...

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#2: California Demon: The Secret Life Of A Demon-hunting Soccer Mom Kate Connor is back—battling demons, trying to figure out why her daughter's chemistry teacher seems so familiar, worrying about her daughter's crush on a surfer dude, and every once in a while, dusting under the sofa. Read more...

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#3: Demons Are Forever: Confessions Of A Demon-hunting Soccer Mom Kate's back—and with husband woes playing havoc with her emotions, an ambitious teen nipping at her heels, and a precious item that the demons are just drooling to get their claws on—this mom's putting in a lot of overtime. Read more...

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#4: Deja Demon: The Days And Nights Of A Demon-hunting Soccer Mom The High Demon Goramesh has returned to San Diablo—this time with a full-blown army of the undead and a plan to get rid of Kate before she can get rid of him. And once again, it's up to Kate to save the world. Good thing she can multitask. Read more...

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#5: Demon Ex Machina: Tales Of A Demon-hunting Soccer Mom With her first husband possessed by a demon and her current husband spending way too much time at home, Demon Hunter Kate Connor is having one hell of a month... Read more...

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Story Behind the Story

Kate Connor has become much like a best friend. And like a good friend, we became acquainted in the most unexpected of ways.

It was 2003, and I was up for contract with Pocket, and trying to think of something to submit as my option book. I'd just written two romantic comedies for them, and wanted to go with a romance series, possibly paranormal. I had an image of a group of guys—very alpha males—with long, black leather coats that billowed as they marched over the marshy ground, each searching out evil, battling it, and finding love in the process.

At the same time, I was a relatively new mom, and the chick lit market was just taking off. I wanted to do something mommy-ish, though. And as I was brainstorming both of these desires with my critique partner, Kathleen O'Reilly, I had one of those V-8 moments. Or, to create a better metaphor, I had a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup moment: two great tastes that go great together. A soccer mom. And a demon-hunter.

Right then, Kate was born, and I banged out the first chunk of chapter one. It hasn't changed much since that first hour at the keyboard. (Though the title did change: Demons & Dirty Diapers really didn't do it for anyone.)

I tentatively sent it to my agent to see what she thought. Fortunately, she loved it, and I put together a proposal. We sent it to multiple publishers, Berkley snatched it up, and days later, Hollywood came knocking. The series is now coming up on it's fourth book, and is in development with Warner Brothers and 1492 Pictures.

Kate's life is becoming more and more complicated, too. But don't worry. She can slay a demon with a stiletto heel and take out a nest of vampires with a crucifix and a bottle of Diet Coke. I'm sure she'll get out of this mess okay. Trouble is, there's a new mess waiting for her just around the corner...

Pick up a book and join the fun! And I hope you love Kate as much as I do.

Julie Kenner

CHRONIC CITY By Jonathan Lethem

CHRONIC CITY By Jonathan Lethem

Another World

By GREGORY COWLES
The New York Times, October 25,2009

By now, Jonathan Lethem is so identified with his native Brooklyn that when he chose Los Angeles as the setting for his last novel — the modest “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” in 2007 — it felt like a vacation or a willful act of misdirection. In fact, though, Lethem’s reputation as a hometown booster rests on the strength of just two books, “Motherless Brooklyn” and “The Fortress of Solitude,” each of which applied a cartographer’s loving attention to the borough. But in four earlier novels and two story collections, Lethem has traipsed all over creation, from Wyoming to the San Francisco Bay Area to the distant Planet of the Archbuilders. Now, in his bravura eighth novel, “Chronic City,” he visits what may be his strangest destination yet: the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Let an early scene stand in for the astonishing whole. The narrator — a former child star named Chase Insteadman, who lives off the residuals from an insipid 1980s sitcom — is getting to know his new friend Perkus Tooth at a Second Avenue burger joint. Perkus is a cultural critic with a recognizably New York sort of résumé: he achieved underground success with a series of broadside rants pasted around the city, then went mainstream with a column in Rolling Stone before fading back into dissolute obscurity. Yet he has never abandoned his wide-ranging obsessions, which echo Lethem’s own: film, literature, music, media. Now, in a booth at Jackson Hole, he holds forth to the affable, vacuous Chase in a stoned seminar that even in summary takes three pages to relate, jumping from Greil Marcus to Chet Baker to Marlon Brando to the insidious effects of The New Yorker’s choice of typeface. It’s a wonderfully slippery list of references, at once dense and daft, as if Susan Sontag had written alternate lyrics to the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Werner Herzog, Monte Hellman, Norman Mailer, Frederick Exley! Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom!

“Can we have discussed so much the very first time?” Chase wonders. “The New Yorker, at least. Giuliani’s auctioning of 42nd Street to Disney. Mailer on NASA as a bureaucracy stifling dreams. J. Edgar Hoover in the Mafia’s thrall, hyping Reds, instilling self-patrolling fear in the American mind. In the midst of these variations the theme was always ingeniously and excitingly retrieved.”

If you don’t recognize that last sentence (I didn’t), Lethem helpfully confesses in his acknowledgments that he has lifted it whole from “Humboldt’s Gift.” It’s a nifty tribute to another novel about a fraught tutor-protégé relationship, and an unsurprising flourish from Lethem, who once composed an entire essay about artistic appropriation by using sentences pilfered from other sources. But don’t read too much into it. With its broad brush strokes and bright primary colors, “Chronic City” owes less to Bellow (a scrupulous realist, after all) than to antic postmodern fabulists like Pynchon and Rushdie and DeLillo — or, as Lethem also puts it in the acknowledgments, to “everywhere else forever and ever amen.”
Lethem’s Manhattan is an alternate- reality Manhattan, an exaggerated version where an escaped tiger is rumored to be roaming the Upper East Side and Times readers can opt for a “war-free” edition dominated by fluffy human- interest stories. Instead of terrorist attacks, an enervating gray fog has descended on the financial district and remained there for years, hovering mysteriously. (Mysterious to the novel’s characters, anyway; investigators may want to subpoena DeLillo’s airborne toxic event.) Lethem has been at this long enough that the style has become recognizably his own: knowing and exuberant, with beautiful drunken sentences that somehow manage to walk a straight line.

Here’s Chase, newly recovered from the flu, describing his first post-fever dalliance with his ghostwriter girlfriend, Oona: “That night we started in the fluorescent glare of Perkus’s hallway, like teenagers escaping a party, hands invading outfits, knees interlaced, sagging to the wall until our breathing got too slow and regular and we contained ourselves, shoved out through that subset of Brandy’s smokers drunk enough not to realize they were freezing, then teetered together, hips eagerly jostling, to my apartment.”

And here he is again, arriving with Perkus at the site of a building collapse that may have been triggered by the tiger, “milling in that human amoeba of gawkers as it was brushed back from the scene by policemen and emergency medical workers, though at its outer edge the collective creature grew grotesquely huge, and throbbed, livid and possibly dangerous, faces lit from underneath by sparkling red-and-yellow flares that had been laid like sticks of dynamite at the feet of barricades.”

In Lethem’s earliest work the tricks and extravagances and gymnastic prose sometimes seemed arch or mannered — merely clever — but they have grown steadily more confident, and here they serve the higher purpose of flinging Manhattan onto the page in all its manic energy. When style and subject merge, tics recede into invisibility.

The turbocharged plot of “Chronic City” is too intricate and seamless, and also too odd, to summarize easily. It involves migraines and hiccups and a luxury residence for dogs, and Perkus’s quest for unattainable vaselike objects, called chaldrons, that hold an almost mystical appeal. Stripped to essentials, though, the story centers on the friendship between Chase and Perkus, and on their travels through Manhattan’s social strata: a party at the billionaire mayor’s mansion, a film project at a highbrow production company, all those hours at Jackson Hole.

Chase is in demand at dinner parties not only because of his days as a child actor but also because of a more recent claim to celebrity — his fiancée, the astronaut Janice Trumbull, is stranded on the International Space Station, from which she sends him long love letters that are excerpted in the war-free Times. This space opera is, to tell the truth, kind of a drag on the narrative, but it does create a useful love triangle: Chase needs to hide his affair with Oona lest he disappoint his adoring public. There are other characters too, representing variations on the theme of idealism and corruption, but never mind them. This is really a buddy novel, no less than “The Fortress of Solitude” was. Chase and Perkus are nominally adults, older than Dylan and Mingus in “Fortress,” but they’re just as adolescent. They eat messy burgers; they watch cult movies; they smoke potent weed and indulge in the kind of paranoid conspiratorial philosophizing that can be tedious in real life but thrilling in dorm rooms and fiction (where, after all, somebody else really is pulling the strings). And, improbably enough, we want it to last forever — or at least long enough for Chase and Perkus to save each other.

That won’t happen, of course. Chase is too ditzy and Perkus too damaged for their friendship to survive unscathed. But if they can’t be rescued, they can and do help each other; Chase, especially, starts to wake up and cast aside his blank torpor. (I do mean blank: in one of the book’s less subtle moments, a waitress misremembers his name as “Chase Unperson,” sending Perkus into a fit of giggles.) “Chronic City” is a dancing showgirl of a novel, yet beneath the gaudy makeup it’s also the girl next door: a traditional bildungsroman with a strong moral compass. Under Perkus’s tutelage, Chase moves from placid compliance toward engagement and self- determination; the actor learns to take action, not just direction.

“The Fortress of Solitude” was a great novel, but also a chaotic sprawl — it addressed gentrification and race relations and comic books and disco and the prison system and more, on and endlessly on. “Chronic City” is more contained, less greedy in its grasp, and it is even better. It limits itself to a single big theme — but then, it’s the biggest there is: the pursuit of truth. Lethem once wrote, in an essay about John Ford’s movie “The Searchers,” that an actor “can be placed under examination as icon of a set of neurotic symptoms . . . and yet still operate as a creature of free will and moral relevance, a character whose choices matter.” This is Perkus’s lesson for Chase. Even in an alternate reality — even in a fiction — passion and significance are everywhere if you know where to look.

Gregory Cowles is an editor at the Book Review.

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This Charming Man by Marian Keyes

'Everybody remembers where they were the day they heard that Paddy de Courcy was getting married'. Lola has every reason to be interested in who Paddy's marrying - because although she's his girlfriend, she definitely isn't the bride-to-be. Heartbroken, she flees the city for a cottage by the sea. But will Lola's retreat prove as idyllic as she hopes? Not if journalist Grace has anything to do with it. She wants the inside story on the de Courcy engagement and thinks Lola holds the key. Grace knew Paddy a long time ago. But why can't she forget him? Grace's sister, Marnie, might have the answer but she also has issues with the past. Her family is wonderful but they can't take away memories of her first love: a certain Paddy de Courcy. What will it take for Marnie to be able to move on? And what of the future Mrs de Courcy...Alicia is determined to be the perfect politician's wife. But does she know the real Paddy de Courcy? Four very different women. One awfully charming man. And the dark secret that binds them all...

About The Author : Marian Keyes is the internationally bestselling author of Watermelon, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, Rachel's Holiday, The Last Chance Saloon, Angels, Sushi for Beginners, Under the Duvet, and The Other Side of the Story. Her books have touched readers around the world, and they are now published in 35 countries and in many different languages. Millions of copies of her books have been sold worldwide.

The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly

In her latest novel, Wolitzer (The Wife; etc.) takes a close look at the opt out generation: her cast of primary characters have all abandoned promising careers (in art, law and academia) in favor of full-time motherhood.

When their children were babies, that decision was defensible to themselves and others; 10 years on, all of these women, whose interconnected stories merge during their regular breakfasts at a Manhattan restaurant, harbor hidden doubts.

Do their mundane daily routines and ever-more tenuous connections to increasingly independent children compensate for all that lost promise?

Wolitzer centers her narrative on comparisons between her smart but bored modern-day New York and suburban mommies and the women of the generation preceding them, who fought for women's liberation and equality.

Contemporary chapters, most of which focus on a single character in this small circle of friends, alternate with vignettes from earlier eras, placing her characters' crises in the context of the women, famous and anonymous, who came before.

Wolitzer's novel offers a hopeful, if not exactly optimistic, vision of women's (and men's) capacity for reinvention and the discovery of new purpose. (Mar.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Book Description

From the bestselling author of The Wife and The Position, a feverishly smart novel about female ambition, money, class, motherhood, and marriage-and what happens in one community when a group of educated women chooses not to work.

For a group of four New York friends, the past decade has been largely defined by marriage and motherhood. Educated and reared to believe that they would conquer the world, they then left jobs as corporate lawyers, investment bankers, and film scouts to stay home with their babies. What was meant to be a temporary leave of absence has lasted a decade. Now, at age forty, with the halcyon days of young motherhood behind them and without professions to define them, Amy, Jill, Roberta, and Karen face a life that is not what they were brought up to expect but seems to be the one they have chosen.

But when Amy gets to know a charismatic and successful working mother of three who appears to have fulfilled the classic women's dream of having it all-work, love, family-without having to give anything up, a lifetime's worth of concerns, both practical and existential, opens up. As Amy's obsession with this woman's bustling life grows, it forces the four friends to confront the choices they've made in opting out of their careers-until a series of startling events shatters the peace and, for some of them, changes the landscape entirely.

Written in Meg Wolitzer's inimitable, glittering style, The Ten-Year Nap is wickedly observant, knowing, provocative, surprising, and always entertaining, as it explores the lives of these women with candor, wit, and generosity.

About the Author

Meg Wolitzer is the author of seven previous novels, including The Position, The Wife, and Surrender, Dorothy. Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1998 and The Pushcart Prize.

THE KITE RUNNER By Khaled Hosseini

The Servant

By EDWARD HOWER

THIS powerful first novel, by an Afghan physician now living in California, tells a story of fierce cruelty and fierce yet redeeming love. Both transform the life of Amir, Khaled Hosseini's privileged young narrator, who comes of age during the last peaceful days of the monarchy, just before his country's revolution and its invasion by Russian forces.

But political events, even as dramatic as the ones that are presented in ''The Kite Runner,'' are only a part of this story. A more personal plot, arising from Amir's close friendship with Hassan, the son of his father's servant, turns out to be the thread that ties the book together. The fragility of this relationship, symbolized by the kites the boys fly together, is tested as they watch their old way of life disappear.

Amir is served breakfast every morning by Hassan; then he is driven to school in the gleaming family Mustang while his friend stays home to clean the house. Yet Hassan bears Amir no resentment and is, in fact, a loyal companion to the lonely boy, whose mother is dead and whose father, a rich businessman, is often preoccupied. Hassan protects the sensitive Amir from sadistic neighborhood bullies; in turn, Amir fascinates Hassan by reading him heroic Afghan folk tales. Then, during a kite-flying tournament that should be the triumph of Amir's young life, Hassan is brutalized by some upper-class teenagers. Amir's failure to defend his friend will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Hosseini's depiction of pre-revolutionary Afghanistan is rich in warmth and humor but also tense with the friction between the nation's different ethnic groups. Amir's father, or Baba, personifies all that is reckless, courageous and arrogant in his dominant Pashtun tribe. He loves nothing better than watching the Afghan national pastime, buzkashi, in which galloping horsemen bloody one another as they compete to spear the carcass of a goat. Yet he is generous and tolerant enough to respect his son's artistic yearnings and to treat the lowly Hassan with great kindness, even arranging for an operation to mend the child's harelip.

As civil war begins to ravage the country, the teenage Amir and his father must flee for their lives. In California, Baba works at a gas station to put his son through school; on weekends he sells secondhand goods at swap meets. Here too Hosseini provides lively descriptions, showing former professors and doctors socializing as they haggle with their customers over black velvet portraits of Elvis.

Despite their poverty, these exiled Afghans manage to keep alive their ancient standards of honor and pride. And even as Amir grows to manhood, settling comfortably into America and a happy marriage, his past shame continues to haunt him. He worries about Hassan and wonders what has happened to him back in Afghanistan.

The novel's canvas turns dark when Hosseini describes the suffering of his country under the tyranny of the Taliban, whom Amir encounters when he finally returns home, hoping to help Hassan and his family. The final third of the book is full of haunting images: a man, desperate to feed his children, trying to sell his artificial leg in the market; an adulterous couple stoned to death in a stadium during the halftime of a football match; a rouged young boy forced into prostitution, dancing the sort of steps once performed by an organ grinder's monkey.

When Amir meets his old nemesis, now a powerful Taliban official, the book descends into some plot twists better suited to a folk tale than a modern novel. But in the end we're won over by Amir's compassion and his determination to atone for his youthful cowardice.

In ''The Kite Runner,'' Khaled Hosseini gives us a vivid and engaging story that reminds us how long his people have been struggling to triumph over the forces of violence -- forces that continue to threaten them even today.

Edward Hower's latest novel is ''A Garden of Demons.'' A former Fulbright lecturer in India, he teaches in the writing department of Ithaca College.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company