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.

The Lizard Cage

The Lizard Cage
by Karen Connelly
Reviewed by Amy Stewart              

 The Lizard Cage is one of the most delicately woven and luminous stories that I have ever read. Connelly is a writer of the capital W variety.  She is able to distill life's primal joys and heart crushing truths into simple lyrical images that make one nod in recognition even as one cringes at the pain. Connelly tells the story of  Teza, a political prisoner in Burma.  From within his cage of solitary confinement Teza's life becomes in extricably tangled and forever linked with a compassionate jailer and an orphan boy who finds shelter within the jail's walls. I did not want this book to end and I will never forget it.

Staff Choices

At a recent staff meeting I asked the members of our staff to tell Pageturners what they had read in the last few months and what they would recommend.  Needless to say there was a wide ranging and diverse selection. Here is what they said:

Lynn Ring liked Diversity of Life, by E.O. Wilson. You can't go wrong there! She said it was a readable, dip into any chapter celebration of nifty stories and facts of the way real things operate in our world.

Kiesy Strauchon picked a classic, Dog Years by Gunter Grass , a meditation on modern history set in Germany in the guise of a novel.

Keith Darrock chose Fly-fishing on the 41st: Around the World on the 41st Parallel.

Treasure Island

Treasure Island
By Robert Louis Stevenson
Reviewed by Robert May

In the 50 years since I first read this adventure quest story, only I have become old and dated.  Treasure Island remains an excellent read for adult, child, girl, woman, boy, and man.  Stevenson's story of the effects of treasure on both the poor and the needy, the adventurer, and the rich and not needy presents a psychological study of the human mind that has stayed as relevant now as when Stevenson wrote this tale of high adventure. Its a good cozy read with tea, time, and a comforter come the wind and the rains.

Falling to Earth

Falling to Earth
by Kate Southwood
Reviewed by
Julie Johnson

I tacked the Earthquake Preparedness checklist to my bulletin board. I think of all the horrific possibilities and resolve to get serious about that disaster checklist.  What I never considered, however, was what it would be like to be someone who escapes harm, whose home remains standing while others are ripped apart, to be someone whose livelihood is not only left intact but who would in fact benefit from the destruction. I never considered how a moment's good fortune could unleash a nightmare. The plot centers on one family: Paul and Mae Graves, their three children and Paul's mother, Lavinia. They alone emerge from a giant tri-state tornado that killed nearly 700 people in 1925 without injury, either to their bodies or to their home. Even Paul's business, the local lumberyard, is unscathed.  Within days the whispering begins and what follows is a haunting exposition on grief and suffering. The poise with which Southwood handles her themes of human nature, chance, suffering and loss left me breathless with admiration.

Christina's Choices

  
Your friend at the Main Desk Christina Lobo says hello and would like to recommend the following fiction books for you!
Two older favorites are Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund, a nautical historical fiction, and Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin.  This story takes place on the Upper West Side of New York in the early 1900's has a touch of the supernatural. Christina does not recommend the movie! A more recent wonderful read is The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt.  It has art, mystery and  a pageturning quality that has made it a huge literary bestseller.

Cartographer of No Man's Land

The Cartographer of No Man's Land by P.S. Duffy is a well-researched novel of World War I.  The main characters are from Nova Scotia and are drawn into the war, sometimes reluctantly, at home and abroad.  It is realistic about the horrors of war and the complexities of loyalty and relationships.  It also deals with waht happens after the Armistice and how broken lives are--and are not put back togther.  The writing is vivid and also poetic and spiritual at times.  I highly recommend this book.

Lori Lisowski