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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Amazon Best Books of the Month, June 2011 : Before I Go to Sleep: A Novel by S.J. Watson

Before I Go to Sleep: A Novel [Hardcover]

By

S. J. Watson

"As I sleep, my mind will erase everything I did today. I will wake up tomorrow as I did this morning. Thinking I’m still a child. Thinking I have a whole lifetime of choice ahead of me. . . ."

Memories define us.

So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep?

Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love—all forgotten overnight.

And the one person you trust may be telling you only half the story.

Welcome to Christine's life.

Every day Christine wakes up not knowing where she is. Her memories disappear every time she falls asleep.

Her husband, Ben, is a stranger to her, and he's obligated to explain their life together on a daily basis--all the result of a mysterious accident that made Christine an amnesiac.

With the encouragement of her doctor, Christine starts a journal to help jog her memory every day. One morning, she opens it and sees that she's written three unexpected and terrifying words: "Don't trust Ben."

Suddenly everything her husband has told her falls under suspicion. What kind of accident caused her condition?

Who can she trust? Why is Ben lying to her? And, for the reader: Can Christine’s story be trusted?

At the heart of S. J. Watson's Before I Go To Sleep is the petrifying question: How can anyone function when they can't even trust themselves?

Suspenseful from start to finish, the strength of Watson's writing allows Before I Go to Sleep to transcend the basic premise and present profound questions about memory and identity.

One of the best debut literary thrillers in recent years, Before I Go to Sleep deserves to be one of the major blockbusters of the summer. --Miriam Landis


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Review

This is one of those books that you open just to glance at the first page and see whether you will like it only to discover yourself five hours later still glued to the book, desperate to find out what happens next. Writing a novel whose main character and narrator suffers from amnesia and doesn't remember most of her life when she wakes up in the morning carries a risk of creating a book that is repetitive. S. J. Watson, however, made Before I Go to Sleep so fascinating, full of surprises, mysteries and revelations that there isn't a single boring page in the entire novel.

Christine, the main character of Before I Go to Sleep, wakes up one morning only to realize that she recognizes neither the man who sleeps next to her nor the house she is in. Even her body is alien to her because her most recent memory is that of being a twenty-year-old student and now she is a woman in her forties. Christine discovers that she lost her memory many years ago and now has to find out who she is anew every single morning of her life. When she finds a diary she has been keeping to remind herself of what she has been doing every day, Christine begins a complex and painful journey to self-discovery.

Before I Go to Sleep is not only a fascinating suspense thriller. It also makes you think about what constitutes the nature of human identity. What makes our personalities? What are we without our memories? How does one go about reconstructing a life that has been shattered by a horrible tragedy that has robbed you of everything you cherished and lived for?

The novel is so professionally structured and so meticulously plotted that I was really surprised to find out that Before I Go to Sleep is S.J. Watson's debut novel. I am extremely glad that I discovered this promising new writer through the Amazon Vine program and will now be eagerly awaiting new books from him. If you like psychological suspense novels, make sure you get this book. It is masterfully written and very believable. I visited the author's website and learned that movie rights to the book have been acquired and the filming will start this year. That is one movie I will definitely be watching.

Reviewed by: Olga Bezhanova (Edwardsville, IL)

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About the author

S. J. Watson lives in London and worked in the National Health Service for a number of years. In 2009 Watson was accepted into the first Faber Academy Writing a Novel course, a rigorous and selective program that covers all aspects of the novel-writing process. Before I Go to Sleep is the result.


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Also available in Kindle Edition

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

THE FUTURE OF LOVE By Shirley Abbott.

Brownstoners

By CLAIRE DEDERER
From The New York Times(nytimes.com)
published March 16, 2008

Like most readers, I know too much about New York. I live on a mountaintop in Colorado, and yet I know that on the streets of Manhattan Maclaren baby strollers are becoming passé. How do I know this? Because New York pours into my house through newspapers, magazines and novels. That overexposure puts heavy demands on the author of the Manhattan novel. So many people know so much about New York life that each detail must be spot-on, note-perfect. Which is to say, I wish Shirley Abbott hadn’t set her wise, funny, generous first novel, “The Future of Love,” in New York.

Abbott, author of the celebrated memoir “The Bookmaker’s Daughter,” has assembled a multigenerational cast. Mark Adler has lost his job and found adulterous love with his child’s preschool teacher. His wife, Maggie, works as a book editor and worries about food additives. Maggie’s mom, Antonia, a former radical, is having an affair with Sam, a publishing executive. Sam’s wife, Edith, cloisters herself at the couple’s country estate, sexless as a nun. They’re all caught short by the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Although everyone continues much as before, their major weaknesses have suddenly been exposed.

Both before and after 9/11, Abbott’s people pursue love and goodness in equal measure. They can’t seem to decide if the moral imperative is more crucial than the pleasure principle, or the other way around. They’re deeply, amusingly ethical about small things, especially when it comes to food: “With her, it was a moral imperative to be lactose intolerant,” observes Sam. Antonia, meanwhile, is baffled by the younger generation’s obsession with organic produce and environmental cleanliness, “this determination not to dirty up the world or be dirtied up by it.”

Antonia is by far the most interesting character. The perspective of this aging, widowed lefty is deeply idiosyncratic, whether she’s discovering AARP sex with Sam or marveling at what she calls her “strange green conservative” of a daughter. Antonia is real and fresh, believably surprising.

But when Abbott abandons Antonia’s perspective the novel is less convincing. Abbott’s younger people talk and think like old people — or like the younger people of a bygone era. The book opens with Mark sitting on a park bench admiring his 4-year-old daughter: “His little Toni was a picture in a dotted-Swiss sundress.” Dotted Swiss is a muslinlike fabric that was popular in the middle of the 20th century. It has been resurrected in the current fad for retro-chic children’s clothes, but it’s far from a common term, and I find it hard to believe that Toni’s 40-year-old father would know what it’s called. When I asked my husband, who’s roughly the same vintage, he thought dotted Swiss was something you’d eat for lunch.

Meanwhile, Toni’s mother, Maggie, worries about one of her authors, who’s nursing a cocaine habit. “ ‘Bolivian marching powder,’ he called it.” Couldn’t an editor have gently explained to Abbott that no one has used this term since Jay McInerney’s protagonist hoovered the stuff in “Bright Lights, Big City,” back in 1984?

I’m not teasing out a few isolated instances: these false notes and anachronisms abound. Good novels discipline us to recognize character through fine points. The form Abbott has chosen — the Manhattan comedy of manners — demands a constant supply of ruthlessly exact detail in order to place characters socially, economically and even emotionally. Abbott gets a lot right: She elegantly weaves together her lovers’ stories. She deftly pokes fun at what we call morality. She allows her characters to be both lovable and ugly. But it’s the truth in the details that gets away from her.


Claire Dederer is a contributor to the Arts & Leisure section of The Times.