Twist by Colum McCann

Twist by Colum McCann

256 pages

Published March 2025 by Random House Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

“Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken.”

Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.

Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.

When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?

My Thoughts: 

In 2010, I read McCann's Let The Great World Spin and completely understood by it won the National Book Award, even if it didn't entirely work for me. But ten years later, I read his Apeirogon. That one I proclaimed "incredible;" so impressed with it was I that I couldn't put words together and had to just type in notes that I had taken as I read the book. 

This one falls somewhere in between for me. I was immediately pulled in by McCann's writing; but the story itself is a slow build as Fennell waits for his opportunity to get on that boat that will ship out to repair a broken internet cable. Even though it gave McCann a great opportunity to paint a picture of who both Fennell and Conway are and the world they find themselves in, I was as eager for Fennell to get on that boat as he was. Let me also be honest and admit that I really couldn't see why Fennell was so interested in being on that boat or what the draw was about the cables. 

Until I could. Once on the boat, though, McCann really begins to amp up the tension, but in the job they've set out to do itself and in the relationships between all of the characters. And I understood what those cables meant...not just to the world because they carry the glass tubes that carry the internet, but all of our connections to each other and our ability to communicate (or not) with each other, as much on a personal level as on a global one.

Once they are out to sea, once that tension began building, I was all in and the closer I got to the end, the harder it was for me to put down the book. Now here's a thing that often happens in a book - we reach the zenith of the story with fifty pages or so left to wrap things up and the story often flags at this point. This one did not. Even after we learn what happened to Conway (we know early on that something has happened that has tarnished his image), I needed to find out how Fennell and Zanele moved on from it. And how Fennell finally resolves his relationship with his son. 

Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese

Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese

560 pages; 23 hours, 54 minutes

Read by Sunil Malhotra

Published February 2009 by Knopf 

Publisher's Summary: 

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics—their passion for the same woman—that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him—nearly destroying him—Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.

My Thoughts: 

I bought a paperback copy of this book something like ten years (or more) ago but it has long languished on my bookshelves because of its length. It felt intimidating, as so many big books do. But when a friend from work strongly recommended it for perhaps the third or fourth time, I knew it was time to get to it. 

I figured a read/listen combination was the best route to go so I requested the audiobook from the library. But at nearly 24 hours long, there was no way I was getting this one listened to in 14 days. It never occurred to me that it would be weeks and weeks before I would be able to check it out a second time to finish it. When that turned out to be the case, I went to pull the paperback off my shelves...only to find it gone. I assumed that I had purged it, in light of the fact that I had requested it in audio format. I resigned myself to waiting for the book. And then, when I randomly decided to reorganize my books one day, I found it, shoved down behind other books. I had something like 200 pages left to read and put it on my bookshelf to read in bed at night. Except I didn't. I either went to bed too late to read or had a library book I needed to finish up and read that instead. So it was weeks before I got back to it, other than to read a few pages at a time. I do not recommend this as a good way to read a book; it's certainly not the way I intended to read/listen to this one when I started. 

In breaking the book up, I can't help but feel that my overall impression of the book suffered. What stuck with me when I got back to the book was not the emotional attachment I had formed for Marion, but rather a feeling that there was entirely too much medical detail, not enough connection to Shiva, and the feeling that the reconnection Marion makes late in the book with a woman he'd spent his life in love with was lacking. 

The Guardian has this to say about the book: 

"This is a book narrated by a surgeon, and structured as a surgeon might structure it: after the body has been cut open and explored everything is returned to its place and carefully sutured up - which is not, in the end, how life actually works."

Which is to say that Verghese chooses to reveal quite a lot about several of the characters well into the book, in time to bring the story to its climax; but, perhaps, too late for the reader to remain connected emotionally. It pulled me out of the story, as did all of the medical detail. 

But, again, I will never know how this all might have felt if I had read this one straight through. I never stopped caring what happened to Marion and I was glad that he has some resolution to things that had troubled him all of his life.  

 

Morality For Beautiful Girls by Alexander McCall Smith

Morality For Beautiful Girls by Alexander McCall Smith

8 hours, 8 minutes

Read by Lisette Lecat

Publisher's Summary: 

In Morality for Beautiful Girls, Precious Ramotswe, founder and owner of the only detective agency for the concerns of both ladies and others, investigates the alleged poisoning of the brother of an important “Government Man,” and the moral character of the four finalists of the Miss Beauty and Integrity Contest, the winner of which will almost certainly be a contestant for the title of Miss Botswana. Yet her business is having money problems, and when other difficulties arise at her fiancé’s Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, she discovers the reliable Mr J.L.B. Matekoni is more complicated then he seems.

My Thoughts: 

My second book about morality this week! To be fair, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books all (well, at least in the three I've read so far) deal with morality to a degree. Also, to be fair, the morality of the beautiful girls is only a tiny part of this book. As with all of the series (again, this is based on only three books but I'm certain that it's a formula that will continue through the series), there is a lot going on in this book. 

When Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni (and truly, he is never called anything else in the books so I can't just give you a first name) seemingly abandons his beloved Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, leaving it in the hands of his two slacker apprentices, his fiancee, Mma Ramotswe steps in. First she needs to figure out what's ailing him and while she waits for him to get better, she also needs to keep both his business and hers afloat. Enter her secretary/assistant detective, Mma Makutsi, who is recruited to first become a secretary for the garage but soon becomes the assistant manager. Surprisingly, she is just what both businesses need. In short order she has the apprentices working hard and business thriving at the garage. Then, while Mma Ramotswe is out of town solving one case, Mma Makutsi lands a big case that will help keep the detective agency afloat. 

One thing that appeals to me about these books is that, while the cases are always solved, the resolution is not always so easy. Her Mma Ramotswe manages to uncover the poisoner but then  finds both a way to heal the family and protect the poisoner. She truly cares about people and is always looking for the way to protect those involved while also resolving the problem. 

These are the perfect books for me to read between other books - not too fluffy, not too dark, and even though I don't always know what the resolution will be to a case, I always know that things will end well for everyone.  And that's just what I need in a book every so often. I've become very fond of these characters and I'm looking forward to the next book. 

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

212 pages

Read by Peter Francis James

Published 1958

Publisher's Summary: 

Okonkwo is born into poverty, with a wastrel for a father. Driven by ambition, he works tirelessly to gain the prosperity of many fields and wives and prestige in his village. But he is harsh as well as diligent. As he sees the traditions of his people eroded by white missionaries and government officials, he lashes out in anger. Things Fall Apart traces the growing friction between village leaders and Europeans determined to save the heathen souls of Africa. But its hero, a noble man who is driven by destructive forces, speaks a universal tongue.

My Thoughts: 

I'll be honest, I know this one is considered a classic (I know because it's on my Classics Club list) but I really struggled with understanding why for most of the book. Perhaps that has something to do with how I read it; this one turned out to be a listen/read/listen one for me when my audiobook loan expired and then I chose to check it out again. Perhaps it's because I read it through the prism of my own moral expectations, judging Okonkwo by standards that wouldn't have applied to him. As time has passed, as the lessons of the book have sunk in, I'm finding a greater appreciation for the book, especially in light of the era in which it was written. Still, because of all of this, I'm struggling with putting my thoughts into words. Instead, let me give you this from Kirkus Reviews (and if you've been here long, you know how rare it is for me to even agree with Kirkus Reviews, let alone defer to them so that will tell you something about how much I love this review):

"Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor."

That last line - wow! It makes it so clear why this book is considered so important. I do highly recommend that you listen to this one if you choose to pick it up; instead of stumbling over names I can't figure out how to pronounce (if even in my own head), the book flows smoothly and the names no longer feel foreign. 

Tears of the Giraffe (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series #2) by Alexander McCall Smith

Tear of the Giraffe (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series #2) by Alexander McCall Smith

Read by Lisette Lecat

7 Hours 49 Minutes

Published September 2002 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

Precious Ramotswe is the eminently sensible and cunning proprietor of the only ladies’ detective agency in Botswana. In Tears of the Giraffe she tracks a wayward wife, uncovers an unscrupulous maid, and searches for an American man who disappeared into the plains many years ago. In the midst of resolving uncertainties, pondering her impending marriage to a good, kind man, Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, and the promotion of her talented secretary (a graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College, with a mark of 97 per cent), she also finds her family suddenly and unexpectedly increased by two.

My Thoughts: 

After just one book in the #1 Ladies Detective Agency series, I already knew what to expect from the books in the series, not the least of which is that these would be detective stories that had far more to do with the lives of Precious Ramotswe, Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, and the people around them than the actual cases that the detective agency takes on. 

In Tear of the Giraffe, we pick up where we left off with Mma Ramotswe and Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni having recently become engaged. Now they must decide which of their homes they will move into after they are married. It becomes clear to Mma Ramotswe quickly that her place on Zebra Road is far preferable but this means that Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni's maid will need to be let go and she is not at all happy to be losing her golden goose. She's been running a side hustle in the house while her employer has been off to work and she's bound and determined to convince him that his fiancee must go. 

That's the first of Mma Ramotswe's problems in this book. Then there is Grace Makutsi, the detective agency's secretary, who wants to take on a bigger role, a couple of cases to be solved with delicacy, and an orphanage matron whose ability to manipulate people changes the lives of Mma Ramotswe and Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni. 

Precious Ramotswe is a sensible woman whose case solving relies on intuition and observation. McCall Smith's writing is equally sensible - nothing fancy about it. Still he manages to give readers vivid pictures of the appearance of his characters and their surroundings. Where he does get lyrical is when he talks about the country of Botswana, which becomes one of the series' characters. 

These are cozy mysteries that will have readers considering morality, decency, and our ability to learn and change. I feel absolutely certain that Lisette Lecat's reading of the books is adding to my enjoyment of the books which makes them even more perfect as books to be listened to when I need something quick and not too heavy to listen to between heavier books. I've already started the next book!

Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Notes On Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

67 Pages

Published May 2021 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary:  

Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure.

Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page—and never without touches of rich, honest humor—Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria.

My Thoughts:

Since my mom died 11 months ago, I've done a lot of thinking about grief as I've done a lot of grieving. 

For these past months I've said time and again that people all grieve differently. And that's true. There is no right or wrong way to grief. The five stages of grief weren't even intended to be for those of us left grieving but instead for those facing their own imminent death. 

But when I find myself gravitating to books about grief, what I find myself looking for are the ways in which grief is universal, for the ways in which other's grief mirrors my own. 

Adichie lost her beloved father in 2020, just after the world shut down because of Covid. Like my family, hers couldn't mourn her parent in the ways that were traditional because of pandemic restrictions. But her family also wasn't able to be together to grief - Adichie was living in the U.S. , another sibling was in England - and in order to hold the traditional ceremony, they were forced to wait months before they could bury her father. Her life growing up in Africa had been much different than had mine. Her initial reaction to the news of her father's unexpected grief was to collapse in uncontrollable sobbing. Mine was to hold that in, lest it overtake me.  

But both of us suddenly found ourselves at a loss, without the person around whom the family had orbited, and unable to imagine how to go on.

""Never" has come to stay. "Never" feels so unfairly punitive. For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there." 

We will no longer hear their voice at the other end of a telephone call. We will be hit with loss in the most unexpected ways and at the most unexpected times. And the grief will go on much longer than we could have imagined. It was not the first time either of us had grieved. But it was the first time either of us had lost a parent and a parent, I've found, is another level of grief I had not experienced before. And I find myself needing to know that, even though we do all grieve differently, there are other people out there who understand the way I feel.

"I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense." 

The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi

The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi

Read by Yetide Badaki and Chukwudi Iwuji

Published August 2020 by Penguin Publishing Group 

Source: audiobook checked out from my local library

Publisher's Summary:

What does it mean for a family to lose a child they never really knew? 

One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son’s body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family’s struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious. Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings. As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerian men. But Vivek’s closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited cousin whose teasing confidence masks a guarded private life. As their relationship deepens—and Osita struggles to understand Vivek’s escalating crisis—the mystery gives way to a heart-stopping act of violence in a moment of exhilarating freedom.

My Thoughts:

Yep, this is another one I had no clue about when I started "reading" it. It's clear from the title that this is a book about the death of a man but I expected that it was we would be working up to the death. Instead, we learn in the first sentence that Vivek Oji has died. Through flashbacks, Emezi takes us back in time to find out how, and why, this troubled young man died. 

Imagine growing up believing you were born in the wrong body. Then imagine that you are doing that in an African country, where homosexuality and transsexuality is even more hated that it is here by so many. Vivek is trying to balance his own needs and desires with the expectations and hopes of his parents. It is heartbreaking to watch him struggle and even more heartbreaking that his story can only, for the most part, be told by others. 

It is a beautifully written, very raw book that is difficult to read on many levels, with some fairly graphic sexual scenes. Some of the supporting characters were not as well developed and I was surprised that so many of the characters were homosexual, not because I have any problem with homosexuality but because  it just seemed unlikely that in such a small group of people, so many would be. I imagine that's what Emezi felt it took to fully tell Vivek's story, to allow him sanctuary. And I so badly wanted him to have sanctuary, even if that did feel a bit forced.

This is another book that I highly recommend "reading" on audiobook. Both narrators are wonderful, fully capturing the emotions of the characters. 

The Camel Bookmobile by Masha Hamilton

The Camel Bookmobile by Masha Hamilton
Published April 2007 by HarperCollins
Source: checked out from my local library

Publisher’s Summary:
Fiona Sweeney wants to do something that matters, and she chooses to make her mark in the arid bush of northeastern Kenya. By helping to start a traveling library, she hopes to bring the words of Homer, Hemingway, and Dr. Seuss to far-flung tiny communities where people live daily with drought, hunger, and disease. Her intentions are honorable, and her rules are firm: due to the limited number of donated books, if any one of them is not returned, the bookmobile will not return.
But, encumbered by her Western values, Fi does not understand the people she seeks to help. And in the impoverished small community of Mididima, she finds herself caught in the middle of a volatile local struggle when the bookmobile's presence sparks a dangerous feud between the proponents of modernization and those who fear the loss of traditional ways.

My Thoughts:
Fresh off Jojo Moyes’ The Giver of Stars, I didn't set out to read another book about bookmobiles traveling out to spread literacy to under served areas. But this one came to my attention as I was browsing for books for my book club and I tend to grab up books from the library as soon as I see them to save myself the trouble of adding them to my TBR. And I’m a fan of Hamilton. Masha Hamilton is a journalist who has traveled all over the world and always brings a sense of the global community to her books, something I always look forward to when I read them.

In Moyes’ book, it never occurred to me to question the rightness of bringing books and literacy to the hill people of Kentucky. Of course, they should learn to read; as the world changes they need to be ready to change with it. But Hamilton wants readers to look at this idea another way. In The Camel Bookmobile, that choice of what books will be brought to them is not given to the villagers. Instead a corporation, more interested in doing something that will make for good PR than something that will be beneficial to the people of Africa, sends a collection of books to be used for the camel bookmobile without regard to what might be of interest or even comprehensible to the villagers.

Further, it doesn’t occur to anyone outside of the villages that these books may do more harm than good to the villages. When it comes to people who have survived hundreds of years in harsh environments, who are we to tell them that their oral knowledge and history isn’t enough? On the other hand, shouldn’t those young people have every opportunity? We need look no further than our own small towns to see how brain drain impacts the viability of a community.

As I read this book, I kept thinking of my friend, Mari, who loves books about Africa, books that explore the culture and lives of its people. This book is full of interesting characters, details about life among a semi-nomadic tribe, and the battle between tradition and modern life. Hamilton paints a world where every night a fence is drawn around your town, fires are light, drums are beaten and songs are sung all in an effort to keep wild animals from attacking the village as it sleeps. Her characters live in a place where a shortage of water is a constant concern, a lack of food normal, and everyone must be ready to pack up and move on at a moment’s notice. Yet Hamilton also makes it clear that these people want the same things out of life that we all want (minus the material desires). I very much enjoyed this one and I’m looking forward to having my book club read it next month and getting to talk to other about it.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Published May 2017 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Source: bought for my Nook

Publisher's Summary:
Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.


My Thoughts:

"Sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your home."

One mother, two daughters who never knew each other and two paths through seven generations on two continents. Effia is forced into marriage with a Englishman in charge of Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast, a port for slave ships. Esi is captured in a raid on her village and and sold into slavery. Through the tribal battles, colonization and then independence of Ghana in Africa and the end of slavery through the Jim Crow South and the jazz years of Harlem, the descendants of Maa'am lives tell the story of the legacy of slavery on both continents. It is an incredible feat of writing made all the more amazing by the fact that, in her debut novel, Gyasi manages to get all of this into just 270 pages.

"The need to call this thing "good" and this thing "bad," this thing "white" and this thing "black," was an impulse that Effia did not understand. In her village, everything was everything. Everything bore the weight of everything else."

This is the lesson of Gyasi's story - everything bears the weight of everything else. She doesn't shy away from saying that Africans made it easy for white to "steal" their people into slavery nor that there were people treating people badly and passing judgement on both continents. It is, perhaps, true that Gyasi draws on some stereotypes when she follows the path of Esi's descendants but that didn't particularly bother me; it allowed her to tell stories that opened my eyes to things I either didn't know about or had forgotten about. For example, how easy it was to arrest a black man just so that he could be leased out for hard labor. Or the fact that while Jazz era Harlem was the haven of blacks, it was largely owned by whites and that the whites who traveled into Harlem to visit the jazz clubs were more comfortable if they were filled by lighter-skinned blacks.

One reviewer didn't find the characters to be memorable. I disagree. These characters and what they went through will stay with me for a long time. Ness, who had the strength to get her child to freedom; H, who led coal miners to unionize; Akua, who went mad from visions of a fire woman; and Yaw, who taught his students:

"We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that our, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture."

Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Alabama so she has strong roots to draw on for both pieces of the story. Perhaps she might have been better able to flesh out her story had it been longer. But, for me, she managed to pack a lot to think about into a slim novel and encouraged me to continue to seek out books that may be uncomfortable, but important, to read.

Cocktail Hour Under The Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller

Cocktail Hour Under The Tree of Forgetfulness  by Alexandra Fuller
256 pages
Published August 2011 by Penguin Group
Source: the publisher & TLC Book Tours

How to summarize Cocktail Hour Under The Tree of Forgetfulness? It is, at it's heart, the story of Alexandra Fuller's mother, Nicola who was born on the Scottish Isle of Skye but spent nearly all of her life in Africa. She certainly is the central character around whom all others orbit and a woman who lived her life so that she would have a biography worth telling. But Africa itself is the star of this book as Fuller chronicles her family's lives through a period when the entire continent was changing profoundly.

In Cocktail Hour Under The Tree of Forgetfulness, Fuller has spent hours interviewing her parents, primarily on vacation in South Africa where they spend hours literally having cocktails under the Tree of Forgetfulness. Ironic, isn't it, that nothing is forgotten under that tree?

Nicola's childhood was both typically British (stiff upper lip, loyalty to blood, that kind of thing) and utterly unusual.

"I used to run away from our bungalow, which was on the edge of the estate, and go over to the main house and play in her [their landlord's] garden with my first best friend, Stephen Foster." Mum smiles at the memory. "Stephen and I used to take turns pushing each other on his tricycle. We wore matching romper suits. We had tea parties. We went everywhere together, hand in hand."
"Stephen was Zoe's son?" I guess.
Mum frowns. "No, no, no," she says. "Stephan wasn't her son. Stephan was her chimpanzee."
There is a small, appalled pause while I try - and fail - to imagine sending one of my toddlers off to play with a chimpanzee.
"Weren't your parents worried he would bite you?" I ask.
Mum give me a look as if I have just called Winnie the Pooh a pedophile, "Stephen? Bite me? Not at all, we were best friends. He was a very, very nice, very civilized chimpanzee. Anyway, my mother didn't worry about me too much. She knew I would always be all right because everywhere I went Topper came with me."
"And Topper was?"
"A dog my father rescued," Mum says."

That passage says so much about the way that Nicola was raised, the way that she raised her own children. No fenced yards or stranger danger for them and animals were, truly part of the family. Nicola and Fuller's father, Tim, met in Africa and only during a period of extreme poverty and sadness did they return to Britain. But there was something about the light of Africa, the air, the opportunity, that drew them back, even when it meant settling in Rhodesia at a time when that country had been cut off by Britain.

"We accepted the war as one of the prices that had to be paid for Our Freedom, although it was a funny sort of Freedom that didn't include being able to say what you wanted about the Rhodesian government or being able to write books that were critical of it. And for the majority of the country, Freedom did not include access to public restrooms, the sidewalks, the best schools and hospitals, decent farming land or the right to vote."

Do you know the line people mock about movies - "I laughed, I cried...?" That was this book for me. I read long passages of this book to my poor husband (why are those passages never as funny when you aren't actually reading the book?), laughing. Then there were places where my heart broke for the Fullers and other passages where I gasped in disbelief at the horrors of war. Fuller places her family squarely into the reality of Africa as native Africans begin fighting to take back their continent.

"War is Africa's perpetual ripe fruit. There is so much injustice to resolve, such desire for revenge in the blood of the people, such crippling corruption of power, such unseemly scramble for the natural resources. The wind of power shirts and there go the fruit again, tumbling toward the ground, each war more inventively terrible than the last."

I loved this book. Although it skipped around quite a bit and it could sometimes take a bit to settle yourself back into where you were at in time and how it related to what else you had read, I ultimately far preferred Fuller's style than if she had tried to tell the story of her family in a more linear way. I grew to understand, at least a bit, what it was about Africa, that drew Fuller's parents and grandparents back to the continent, even at great personal risk. And I fell in love with Nicola, a woman who, at first glance, would appear to be one of the most thoughtless mothers you've ever read about. Not cruel, really, just a product of her upbringing and life. But Fuller, herself, clearly loves her mother, a woman of whom she says "the broken, splendid, fierce mother I have."

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour! For other opinions about the book, check out the full tour for this book. To learn more about Fuller, check out her website, where you can also learn more about her first memoir, Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight, a book Nicola forever after referred to as that Awful Book.

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

Little Bee by Chris Cleave
288 pages
Published February 2009 by Simon and Schuster Adult
Source: bought it for the Omaha Bookworms March read

After two years in a British detention center for immigrants, Little Bee is finally being released along with three other refugees.  Each of the girls is carrying a plastic bag with all of their worldly belongings in them.  For one of the girls, the bag is empty, in another there are pineapple rings, in a third there is a mass of official documents.  In Little Bee's there is a business card and a driver's license belonging to Andrew O'Rourke.

 "The African girl they locked up in the immigration detention center, poor child, she never really escaped. In my soul she is still locked up in there, forever, under the fluorescent lights, curled up on the green linoleum floor with her knees tucked up under her chin. And this woman they released from the immigration detention center, this creature that I am, she is a new breed of human. There is nothing natural about me. I was born - no, I was reborn - in captivity."

 Ten days later, Little Bee rings the door bell at the O'Rourke home, stunning Sarah O'Rourke. Andrew and Sarah had first met Little Bee on a beach in Nigeria while they were on a vacation but neither of them had ever expected to see Little Bee again.  All three of them have never forgotten what happened that day.

Have you ever seen the movie "The Crying Game?" Toward the end of that movie there was a major revelation that entirely changed everything. The makers of the movie asked that viewers of the movie not let the secret out and people were astonishingly good about not reveling the secret. This publishers of this book have made a similar request of readers and in the spirit of not spoiling the book for anyone, I'm going not going to give anything more of the plot away. Although I don't think the twist in Little Bee that has been so well guarded is quite as shocking, there are actually a number of surprises in this book.

The book is written in alternating first-person narratives by both Little Bee and Sarah and both women bare their souls to the reader. Cleave does a marvelous job of capturing both voices. Occasionally I felt that the book dragged a bit on both sides of the story and I found myself not much liking Sarah, but then I'm sure that Cleave did not intend for his readers to like her. Little Bee's narratives were full of wonderful observations about society that really caught my attention.

"Everything was happiness and singing when I was a little girl. There was plenty of time for it. We did not have hurry. We did not have electricity or fresh water or sadness either, because none of these had been connected to our village yet."

I have often thought that all the things we think people in remote villages need are just the things that start causing problems for the villagers.

I've been wanted to read Little Bee since it first came out but finally got to it because the Omaha Bookworms chose it for our March read. In the same paragraph as the above quote, three of us had marked this passage as an example of Cleave's lovely writing.

"I sat in between the roots of my limba tree and I laughed while I watched Nkiruka swinging back and fro, back and fro. The tether of the swing was very long, so it took a long time for her to travel from one end of its swing to the other. It never looked like it was in a rush, that swing. I used to watch it all day long and I never realized that I was watching a pendulum counting down the last seasons of peace in my village."

Little Bee was recommended to me by a number of people as an excellent book club read and they were so right. Several of the ladies had not finished the book yet but all were eager to discuss what they had read and all enjoyed the book. Little Bee is not a light nor an easy read but it is a book well worth reading.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
576 pages
Published: July 2005 by Harper Collins
Source: I bought this one at the Goodwill for 99 cents!

Nathan Price, a Baptist minister, decides, against all advice, to take his family to the heart of the Congo in 1959 to spread the word of God. They arrive there, thinking they have everything they need to get started--hammer, boxed cake mixes for birthdays they will celebrate there, and seeds to plant a garden. The only problem is that there is are no nails to hammer, the humidity causes the cake mixes to become rock-like in the box and, although the seeds will grow, they will not put on fruit--there are no bees to pollinate anything. And that is just the beginning of their misunderstanding of the people and ways of the Congo. The story is told from five different points of view--each of the four daughters and the mother and each of them tells their own story about trying to make their way through their time in the village of Kilanga. The oldest, Rachel, steadfastly refuses to learn the ways of the people and thinks only of how to get out of there. The youngest, Ruth May, soon becomes friends with the children. Leah, one of the twins, comes to the Congo determined to win her father's favor and to lead a life lead by the Bible. But she soon finds herself questioning everything she ever believed and learning to understand the subtleties of life in the village. Adah, the other twin, who has been crippled since birth, is the most observant and bides her time spying on everyone, including the pilot who brought them to the village and sometimes spends time in a hut nearby where he has a radio that no one knows about and seems to be plotting something. Kingsolver follows the life of the family during the little more than a year they spent in the village, through tragedy and then back into new lives as she continues to follow them for three decades.

I absolutely loved the first half of this book--the time the family spent in the village. Kingsolver does a marvelous job writing from the various points of view. I'm not sure I've ever read a book where the author did a better job of giving each point of view a unique voice. There was never any doubt, as I read, which girl was telling me that part of the story. And the writing was beautiful. Orleanna's parts are always written from the present looking back and her early parts are haunting.

"Seen from above this way they are pale doomed blossoms bound to appeal to your sympathies. Be careful. Later on you'll have to decide what sympathy they deserve, the mother especially - watch how she leads them on, pale-eyed, deliberate."

"You played some trick on the dividing of my cells so my body can never be free of the small parts of Africa it consumed...It's the scent of accusation."

Orleanna struggles with her role as wife and mother. She has never entirely been on board with her husband's religious views but stays on with him, even as he is obviously oblivious to the realities of life, saying he is "well inclined toward stubbornness, and contemptuous of failure." It was hard to imagine a mother allowing anyone to do to her family what Nathan did, but I had to keep reminding myself that this was a different time and place.

The second half of the book felt much slower to me, although it covers a vastly greater period of time. Perhaps for that very reason. It lost some of it's in lyricism and depth as it looked into the lives of the women as they plunged through what had happened to them over a more extended period of time. I also felt like it got a bit preachy, not necessarily that what Kingsolver was preaching was wrong, but just that it wasn't right for the novel as it had been going. I wasn't alone in my opinion of this part of the book when my book club met last night. "Preachy" was exactly the word several ladies used to describe a good part of the second half of the book. But Kingsolver still gives the reader much to love in this part.

"But his kind will always lose in the end. I know this, and now I know why. Whether it's wife or nation they occupy, their mistake is the same: they stand still, and their stake moves underneath them."

"As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop."

There is so much going on in this book, so much to think about. Religion, life in another culture and what it takes to try to live in that culture, the history of Africa as the Europeans and Americans came into it. It is a book that will stay with me for a long time and one that I can easily imagine reading again.