The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet

 The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet 
  by David Mitchel
  Reviewed by Robert May

This book of historical fiction takes place at the turn of the eighteenth century

 in the Dutch walled trading city of Dejima located near Nagasaki, Japan.  A Dutch East India Company clerk, Jacob De Zoet has left the Netherlands seeking status and a profitable career so that he will be able to marry the girl that he left behind.  Arriving in Dejima, he finds himself in a corporate Dutch society that is right next to and ancient traditional feudal society.  DeZoet  is basically an honest man who must balance his own life and morals against the corruption of both cultures. The issues of serfdom, gender discrimination and ingrained customs spin throughout this well-plotted, well written tale that capures the reader's attention and holds it to the last page. The author is also known for his novels The Cloud Atlas and the Bone Clock.

 

                           

 

          

The Last Runaway

The Last Runaway
by Tracy Chevalier

The story takes place in rural Ohio in 1850. A young Quaker woman named Honor Bright has recently moved from England to join her new husband. Ohio was a sparsely settled frontier and Honor is shocked by the uncouth and raw experience of the New World. As a Quaker Abolitionist, Honor is most upset by the reality of slavery.  Even though Ohio isn't a slave state, it serves as a major route on the Underground Railroad and runaways regularly cross the family property. The Haymaker family refuse to offer them food or shelter or hide them when a local slave hunter comes to track them down. Honor is horrified but learns the costs of standing up for one's moral beliefs.  Ms. Chelvalier continues to write great historical fiction in the tradition of The Girl with the Pearl Earring", and Remarkable Creatures, this time in the United States.

Euphoria

Euphoria
by Lilly King

Reviewed by Cris Wilson

Margaret Mead was a role model for many girls coming of age in the 60's. We had "Coming of Age in Samoa" and Jane Goodall's work with the chimpanzees, and Mary and Louis Leakey in Africa. Becoming an anthropologist seemed like the most wonderful aspiration. It was exciting to think about leading a life of adventure and writing something important about how human groups didn't all behave or believe the white western way. Lily King has taken the bare facts of Mead's work New Guinea with her first husband and added the entanglement of meeting Gregory Bateson to form a love triange while moving amid dangerous and volatile tribesmen in the Sepik River basin.  This is a novel imagining what could have happened with enough truth to make it a delightful and authentic escape for the reader.

  

All the Light You Cannot See

All the Light You Cannot See
by Anthony Doerr
2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Reviewed by Cris Wilson

I’m not sure I  read a better novel last year than Anthony ­Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See.” Enthrallingly told, beautifully written  it is completely unsentimental although one is brought to tears by the beauty and the horror.  Doerr’s two protagonists are children who have been engulfed in the horror of World War II. One is Marie-Laure LeBlanc, the blind daughter of the widowed master locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Shy but courageous and resourceful, Marie-Laure has learned to navigate the streets of her quartier with the help of a wooden scale-model made by her father. He also sharpens her mind by hiding birthday gifts in intricate puzzle boxes that he carves. He gives her an important gift of 20000 Leagues under the Sea, her first book in Braille.I felt that I understood what it was to be  blind as I read the sections about Marie-Laure Werner. The other is Werner Pfennig,an orphan boy in Germany with an untaught understanding of circuitry. When he and his sister Jutta find a broken short-wave radio behind the Children’s Home where they live, Werner repairs it. Turning the dial, they hear a mysterious Frenchman talking about science: “What do we call visible light?” the Frenchman asks. “We call it color. But . . . really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.” Werner is as entranced by this lesson as Marie-Laure is by the writings of Jules Verne. You too will be entranced as you follow the twisting pathways of these two young people navigating through the dangers of WWII.