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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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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A WOLF AT THE TABLE: A Memoir of My Father By Augusten Burroughs

Returning to the Past and Finding the Bogeyman Is Still There

When Augusten Burroughs wrote “Running With Scissors,” he regaled readers with hilarious tales of the domestic craziness he endured while growing up. Now in another family memoir Mr. Burroughs makes a crazy move of his own. “A Wolf at the Table” is a portrait of the author’s apparently maniacal and Augusten-hating father. Determinedly unfunny, awkwardly histrionic and sometimes anything but credible, it repudiates everything that put Mr. Burroughs on the map.

It’s a bad sign when a book’s cover graphic packs more of a wallop than the text does. But “A Wolf at the Table” startles from afar by depicting a demonic-looking red fork, its tines bent like evil claws, seeming to point menacingly at some hapless victim. Enter the baby Augusten: the author channels his frightened 1 ½-year-old self. He does this with a burst of psychodrama that seems to have been editor-proof.

“Through this pinprick hole I could see the world,” he writes about sitting in his high chair, peeking through the perforations in a saltine cracker. Well, at least he’s not writing in fragments. But by the next page he is. “The thick slippery feel of my bottle’s rubber nipple inside my mouth,” he recalls verblessly. “The shocking, sudden emptiness that fills me when it’s pulled away.”

Well, at least he’s not invoking his toddler years in the present tense. And at least he’s not displaying Joycean affectations. But a line or two later, he is: “High above me is my crib, my homebox, my goodcage, but it’s up, up, up.” And: “I am alone in the awake-pit with the terrible bright above my head.” In case the cause for this free-floating distress is not apparent, Mr. Burroughs soon fingers his culprit. “On the other side of the door,” he writes, “He is laughing.”

He may find twisted humor in little Augusten’s situation, but it’s hardly clear why. “A Wolf at the Table” is as vague as it is hyperbolic about whatever was wrong with the author’s wicked father. This book indicates that the father drank heavily and quarreled with Augusten’s mother (to the point that they separated, and the father was a mere psoriasis-plagued memory by the time of Running with Scissors"). He was away from home a lot and was none too glad to see Augusten when he got back, not even when Augusten greeted him in a homemade dog costume. Don’t even ask what the old man did to Ernie, Augusten’s beloved pet guinea pig. But beyond that, the nature of this book’s indictment is unclear.

A photograph of Mr. Burroughs’s father, accompanying a recent article in The New York Times, depicted a fierce-looking, hollow-eyed man. Unfortunately for “A Wolf at the Table” that image was much more disturbing than anything Mr. Burroughs has put on the page.

Sometimes the book reduces the child to cartoon-character indignation. (“My hatred for him nearly caused my skin to steam, and I was constantly plotting revenge for one thing or another,” he fumes about his older brother.) Some of it exaggerates the simplest details to make them sinister. (The belts in the father’s drawer are said to be “coiled like snakes.”) And some of it pumps heavily metaphoric importance into minor-sounding incidents, clumsily ratcheting up the drama of the boy’s early life. Why was he too filled with dread to eat red velvet cake at a birthday party? Can the answer have been interesting enough to warrant inclusion in this book?

Since it can’t, “A Wolf at the Table” plants the dangerous idea that Mr. Burroughs’s story is a life milked dry. “Dry” was another of his memoirs, detailing a history of substance abuse; “Sellevision” was about his experiences in the advertising business; “Magical Thinking” wasn’t about much of anything. “Possible Side Effects” described the writer’s experience of being on a book tour, something that is also mentioned in the epilogue to the new book.

Prose about book tours attests that Mr. Burroughs has exhausted his vein of autobiographical nonfiction, just as surely as the fate of Ernie (“rigid in his sludge, his feces-caked mouth open in a scream”) proved Mr. Burroughs’s father to be a lousy rodent custodian.

Once it escapes the high chair and begins casting about for material, the author’s recovered memory yields a few stories about his parents’ turbulent and doomed marriage; little Augusten’s crush on a workman (“I had to run away, because there existed the very real danger that I would run to him, leap right up into his arms, and smother him with kisses, like some icky girl”), a few phantasmagorically violent daydreams about the harm Augusten’s father might inflict; and scenes of wild, over-the-top action, written with an assonance (“the jabbing slash of his flashlight”) that bodes badly for a Burroughs move toward poetry. No less strained are this book’s efforts to animate the universe in ways that foreshadow the boy’s burgeoning sexuality: “There were cunning little birds in brazen colors that flashed about like wild thoughts and perverse impulses.”

By the time “A Wolf at the Table” reaches its foregone conclusion — that the father will die and leave his son in some mournful semblance of peace — there is a new kind of suspense in the air. It involves Mr. Burroughs’s literary future. He remains a writer with a large and loyal following, a fluent and funny storyteller whenever he actually has stories to tell. Maybe those stories needn’t be so personal. Maybe his range can expand beyond tales of dysfunction. And maybe some thoughts belong on the page more than others do. No matter how plagued he is by the abuses of the past, he needn’t have confessed here to having had an erotic dream about visiting a mass murderer on death row.

From: Books of The Times: By JANET MASLIN: May 1, 2008

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.