![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Piper’s Son
Apr. 17th, 2012 08:38 pm“Do you have any books you listened to on the Odyssey Award committee that you think I would like?” I asked our teen librarian. She gave me this one. Had I read the back cover first, two years after the unexpected death of a male family member would have sounded really uncomfortably close, given that I started the book exactly two years after my own brother’s unexpected death. I’m glad I went ahead anyway.
The Piper’s Son by Melina Marchetta. Read by Michael Finney.
Tom Mackee wakes up in a hospital bed with a huge headache and no memory of getting there. Sitting next to him is his old friend Francesca Spinelli, whom he hasn’t seen in two years and isn’t happy to be seeing now. His Uncle Joe was blown up in the London train bombings of 2005, joining Tom’s grandfather Tom Finch, who died in Vietnam, in the “bodies never returned” club. In the two years since Joe’s death, his family has fallen apart, Tom’s mother leaving Sydney for Brisbane with his little sister Annabelle. Tom stayed to help his father, who was struggling with deep alcohol problems, until his father disappeared, too. Now it’s been a year since anyone in the family has seen the man who was so charismatic in leading local unions that he was called the Piper. Meanwhile, Tom has dropped out of university, stopped seeing his friends, quit their band, and left the girl he loved. He’s been living on the dole with a couple of potheads, using drugs, alcohol and casual sex to numb the pain. But now those roommates have been kicked out of their apartment and thrown his things on the street. Tom has no one to turn to except his Aunt Georgie, his father’s sister. At close to 40, she’s pregnant for the first time by her ex-husband. Though her own life is a bit messy, she agrees to take Tom in only on the condition that he finds a job, so he finds mindless part-time data entry work to appease her. Then, wandering into the Union Bar, where his family has hung out for years, he learns that his former roommates, previous employees there, stole a large amount of money. Something finally snaps, and Tom insists on starting work at the Union to pay back what his former friends stole. But this means working with Francesca and Justine, two of the Five Horsewomen of the Apocalypse who were part of his gang before. Tara Finke, his lost love, is overseas, but even the cook at the Union knows how he broke her heart. Meanwhile, Georgie can neither talk nor speak to her ex, and won’t admit the obvious fact of her pregnancy even to her best friends.
This is marketed as a teen book, though Georgie’s point of view gets nearly equal time with Tom’s, and even Tom is no longer a teenager. The only reason that I can see for this is that Tom’s gang of friends featured in Marchetta’s earlier book, Saving Francesca, which was definitely a teen book. Here, Marchetta does an amazing job looking at the way grief can muck up lives. Both in Tom’s family and his circle of friends, everyone loves one another fiercely, and yet no one has been able to keep things together enough to stay together. It takes a whole bunch of broken people working in their limping way towards healing to start putting things right. Even though Tom is not someone I’d normally identify with beyond this shared grief, Marchetta keeps him a sympathetic character even when he’s acting like a jerk for large portions of the book. I’m very glad to have listened to this, because while I know what Australians sound like in general, it’s difficult for me to keep the voices sounding right in my head when I’m reading silently to myself. Michael Finney does a fine job, reading with just the right tones and managing that difficult task for a male narrator of convincing and distinct female voices as well as male. I’m not usually one for depressing realistic fiction, but I really enjoyed this one, so much that I checked out Saving Francesca right away. The Piper’s Son is sad, funny, beautiful and ultimately heartwarming. You should read it.
Cross-posted to http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org and http://sapphireone.livejournal.com .
The Piper’s Son by Melina Marchetta. Read by Michael Finney. Tom Mackee wakes up in a hospital bed with a huge headache and no memory of getting there. Sitting next to him is his old friend Francesca Spinelli, whom he hasn’t seen in two years and isn’t happy to be seeing now. His Uncle Joe was blown up in the London train bombings of 2005, joining Tom’s grandfather Tom Finch, who died in Vietnam, in the “bodies never returned” club. In the two years since Joe’s death, his family has fallen apart, Tom’s mother leaving Sydney for Brisbane with his little sister Annabelle. Tom stayed to help his father, who was struggling with deep alcohol problems, until his father disappeared, too. Now it’s been a year since anyone in the family has seen the man who was so charismatic in leading local unions that he was called the Piper. Meanwhile, Tom has dropped out of university, stopped seeing his friends, quit their band, and left the girl he loved. He’s been living on the dole with a couple of potheads, using drugs, alcohol and casual sex to numb the pain. But now those roommates have been kicked out of their apartment and thrown his things on the street. Tom has no one to turn to except his Aunt Georgie, his father’s sister. At close to 40, she’s pregnant for the first time by her ex-husband. Though her own life is a bit messy, she agrees to take Tom in only on the condition that he finds a job, so he finds mindless part-time data entry work to appease her. Then, wandering into the Union Bar, where his family has hung out for years, he learns that his former roommates, previous employees there, stole a large amount of money. Something finally snaps, and Tom insists on starting work at the Union to pay back what his former friends stole. But this means working with Francesca and Justine, two of the Five Horsewomen of the Apocalypse who were part of his gang before. Tara Finke, his lost love, is overseas, but even the cook at the Union knows how he broke her heart. Meanwhile, Georgie can neither talk nor speak to her ex, and won’t admit the obvious fact of her pregnancy even to her best friends.
This is marketed as a teen book, though Georgie’s point of view gets nearly equal time with Tom’s, and even Tom is no longer a teenager. The only reason that I can see for this is that Tom’s gang of friends featured in Marchetta’s earlier book, Saving Francesca, which was definitely a teen book. Here, Marchetta does an amazing job looking at the way grief can muck up lives. Both in Tom’s family and his circle of friends, everyone loves one another fiercely, and yet no one has been able to keep things together enough to stay together. It takes a whole bunch of broken people working in their limping way towards healing to start putting things right. Even though Tom is not someone I’d normally identify with beyond this shared grief, Marchetta keeps him a sympathetic character even when he’s acting like a jerk for large portions of the book. I’m very glad to have listened to this, because while I know what Australians sound like in general, it’s difficult for me to keep the voices sounding right in my head when I’m reading silently to myself. Michael Finney does a fine job, reading with just the right tones and managing that difficult task for a male narrator of convincing and distinct female voices as well as male. I’m not usually one for depressing realistic fiction, but I really enjoyed this one, so much that I checked out Saving Francesca right away. The Piper’s Son is sad, funny, beautiful and ultimately heartwarming. You should read it.
Cross-posted to http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org and http://sapphireone.livejournal.com .
Cleaning Nabokov’s House by Leslie Daniels Barb has left her controlling husband. Now she’s stranded in upstate New York in a town where everyone knows and loves her experson and could care less about her. She’s lost custody of her children. She’s jobless and homeless and holding on to sanity with a very tenuous grip. This could be the beginning of a serious work of Women’s Fiction, the kind that Oprah would want to talk about and which would require boxes of tissues. Instead, Barb’s journey to pulling her life together and getting her children back is hilarious. It’s still women’s fiction, just not the depressing kind. Barb’s first step towards getting her footing back is selling her reliable car (keeping the unreliable one) to make a down payment on a small house which turns out to have belonged to Nabokov. In this house, wedged behind a drawer, she finds a manuscript which might or might not have been written by Nabokov. Her efforts to get this published start pushing her back towards sanity, making her friends in the process. She also comes up with a scheme to make enough money to win her children back, a scheme that I totally did not see coming and which gives the book both its silliest and most serious moments, a scheme to make more of the women of the small town where she now lives happy. It’s sexy without being explicit, and Barb’s feelings run true even as the plot runs towards the unbelievable comedic. It made for excellent hospital reading for me, as we were once again stuck there, but I’m hoping that you, dear reader, can enjoy it under more pleasant circumstances.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Ann Barrows. Read by Various (cast) Another book that deserves to be a bestseller. Writer Juliet Ashton made a living writing humor about World War II, but now that the war is over she’s tired of humor and needs a new book topic. Then she receives a letter from a man on the island of Guernsey, who’s somehow come into possession of one of her old books and wants more of the same. As Juliet learns more about the occupation of Guernsey and the Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society that began first as a front for curfew-breakers, she corresponds with more and more of its members on Guernsey. The story is told entirely in letters and telegrams, to and from Juliet and her publisher, her best friend and the publisher’s sister, and the American publisher who’s smitten with her, as well as the various members of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Though the war and its aftereffects are necessarily present and dark, the overall effect of the books is hopeful and extremely charming. The audio version is read by a nearly full cast, giving extra depth to the story. I listened with delight and wished the book went on longer than it did.
The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany BakerThe hook of the plot is the narrator, Truly, a girl who is born large, grows quickly, and never stops. Her sister, Serena Jane, is the prettiest girl in town. When they are orphaned, Serena Jane gets her own room with a nice family in town, while Truly is packed off to live on a poor farm on the outskirts of town. She befriends other outcasts – Amelia Dyerson, the daughter of the family where she lives, and Marcus, too small and too smart to fit in at school. Truly’s memories of growing up are mixed in with her odd adult life, caring for the town doctor, Robert Morgan, her sister’s ex-husband. Truly also shares the town stories of the first Robert Morgan, who came from the South after the civil war, and seemingly out of frustration married the local herb-witch, Tabitha Dyerson. Out of this plot-line comes Truly’s on-going search for Tabitha’s legendary Book of Shadows. Truly’s story of being too large to belong anywhere had a strong potential for freakishness but turned out a beautiful story of the search for humanity and blessing.
The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen 28-year-old Josey Cirrini will never be the southern belle her mother was, or the beloved civic figure her father was before his death. She’s resigned herself to a life dedicated to caring for her domineering mother, comforting herself with a secret closet full of candy and snack cakes. (Every chapter is also named for a thematically appropriate sweet.) And then one day a trashy, outspoken woman turns up in the closet and refuses to leave. Josey recognizes Della Lee, who is clearly on the run from someone. At Della Lee’s prompting, Josey leaves the house without her mother to get a sandwich from a small sandwich shop. Chloe, the owner, is only a couple of years older than Josey. She’s just kicked out her boyfriend, Jake, who revealed that he cheated on her. Here is where we start noticing that the book isn’t your average chick lit. Chloe and Josey become friends, of course, but eggs cook hard and coffee boils in the pot when Jake and Chloe are in the room together. And Chloe has a book problem. They just show up when they think she needs them, and follow her around until she reads them. Usually she likes them, but not when the books seem to be telling her something she doesn’t want to hear. The only magic around Josey seems to be the unpleasant kind that pulls in her stomach and lets her know whenever the mail man, Adam, is getting close. Josey finds that there’s more to herself and her family than she knew in this bewitching story. As with Addison’s 
Everything Nice by Ellen Shanman Prickly Mike loses her job, too, when her lecherous boss Brian is fired from a prestigious ad agency. Suddenly she discovers that everyone wants team players with people skills and already knows she has neither. Soon she’s in a downward spiral, drinking too much, sneaking in to her ex’s comedy club performances to hear him rail against her, and pushing away Gunther, her only friend. Just when she’s being evicted, her father, widowed when Mike was four, announces that he’s engaged and his fiancée is moving in. The fiancée suggests that Mike ask about a job at her former place of employment, an all-girls charter school. Now she’s stuck teaching Life Skills to a terrifying group of giggling and whispering thirteen-year-olds. Mike as a character was hard to like at first, but things turned around so nicely that I couldn’t be offended at the unsurprising redemptive ending. Because sometimes a little redemption is a beautiful thing.
The Flirt by Kathleen Tessaro Imagine yourself finding that the spark has gone out of your marriage. You’d like to get things going again, but since part of the problem is that you’re not feeling amorous, either, you’re not sure where to start. If you are a man in London, enter the hired flirt, a “professional massager of the female ego”, who will conduct a chaste yet thrilling flirtation with your wife. She’ll start being excited about herself, and you’ll start being excited about her. On the other hand, if you are a woman in a similar position, you could visit Bordello, and have the proprietress make seductive yet subtle custom lingerie, such that you won’t look like you’re trying at all, but your husband will nevertheless find you irresistible. 
The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs Georgia Walker was young, single and pregnant when an older lady suggested that she use her knitting to make a living for herself. Now, her daughter Dakota is 12 and Georgia is the proprietress of a thriving New York City knitting store, Walker and Daughter, which is also staffed by the elderly and widowed Anita. As our story opens, a group of women wanting companionship and help with their knitting coalesces into the Friday Night Knitting Club. Our cast includes Georgia’s old friend from publishing, K.C., who is always starting but never finishing big projects; Lucie, a single and out of work television producer; Georgia’s daughter Dakota, who provides baked goodies; and Darwin, a women’s studies grad student bent on proving that knitters are submitting themselves to the patriarchy. The plot thickens further for Georgia as Dakota’s father James, missing since the pregnancy was discovered, turns up. Her old best friend from high school, now a rich society lady, also comes in to commission a hand-knit ball gown. The story switches between all of the major characters, as they all work through their own struggles and learn to rely on each other. It’s classic strong female friendship stuff, with some Wisdom from the Grandmothers (and a random priest) thrown in. It’s all about the characters and the relationships, and is already being promoted for book clubs. Did I mention that I read during rare knitting opportunities?
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks It’s 1996. Hanna Heath is a young Australian book conservator, asked to work on the famous Sarajevo Haggadah. This book, which really exists, tells the story of Passover, and is a very rare example of a Jewish illuminated book. As Hannah takes apart the book to remove its horrid nineteenth century binding and examines all its pages, she finds various artifacts in it – a white hair, a butterfly wing, a red stain, and salt. Hanna’s journey around the world to find out what these things are is interspersed with the stories of how the artifacts came to be there and the people of all three monotheistic religions who cared for the book over the centuries. There’s a reason this book has been a bestseller – it’s got good characters, fascinating settings around the world and through history, and a compelling plot.
Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon 
Nice to Come Home To by Rebecca Flowers Prudence Whistler has always been just that – prudent. She’s always had a written plan for her life, and followed it to the letter. At 36, though, her plan is crashing down around her. She’s fired from her job at a non-profit and her boyfriend dumps her just as she had decided that he’d be an OK husband. Her younger sister, Patsy, is a single mother who believes in following her heart, and who’s still holding out for true love. Pru has always been sure that she’s better at life than Patsy – but a weekend trying to parent two-year-old Annali by herself as well as suddenly finding Patsy and herself in the same boat has her reconsidering. A crazy cat, a couple of gay best friends, a few NPR inside jokes, and some inappropriate romantic choices round out at lighten the story. Her search for a vocation, love and family is authentic and tender without losing the sense of fun.
There's No Place Like Here by Cecilia Ahern New popular Irish author Cecilia Ahern wins with another lightly thoughtful book. Tall and dark-haired Sandy Shortt has been obsessed with missing people ever since snotty Jenny-May from across the street went missing when they were 10. She’s spent her life helping people look for missing loved ones, but never felt particularly connected herself. Then, shortly before a meeting with a man whose brother has been missing for a year, she disappears herself. She finds herself in Here, the place where missing people and things go. For the first time in her life, there are plenty of people to whom Sandy feels connected, from hearing their family members talk about them, all of them eager to hear her news. But nothing ever goes missing in Here, and Sandy wants more than anything to go home again. The plot cuts back and forth between this story; Sandy’s growing up and subsequent relationship with the young school psychologist; and the efforts of her latest client to locate her, the one person he believes might help him reach closure over his brother. The message is obvious from the title of the book, but the characters are sweet and likeable, and the book makes for a fun read.
The Masque of the Black Tulip by Lauren Willig Eloise is a Harvard graduate student, writing her dissertation on English spies in France after the Revolution. She's in England, worming her way into old family archives to find the truth behind spies who, unlike the Scarlet Pimpernel, were never unmasked during their lifetime. Her modern-day dilemmas are the frame for the story of the spies she's researching. In this second book of the series, our spies are Lady Henrietta Selwick and Lord Miles Dorrington. They are under great suspicion from France, as they are the little sister and best friend of Lord Richard Selwick, formerly the Purple Gentian. Either one of them could be or could lead the French to the Pink Carnation, the subject of the first book. In fact, the Pink Carnation is trying to get word to them that France has unleashed its deadliest assassin, the Black Tulip, on England. Both Hen and Miles are eager to help the Pink Carnation discover the identity of the Black Tulip. Miles is struggling with the realization that Henrietta is prettier than ever – and strictly off limits. It is equal parts intrigue and romance, with each cropping up at inconvenient moments for the other. The author, herself a Harvard graduate student, pays attention to historical accuracy, with a note at the back to explain where and why she changed things. This is delicious fun.
The Heroines by Eileen Favorite It’s the early 1970s. Thirteen-year-old Penny Entwhistle lives with her mother in a little B&B on the Illinois prairie. Along with some regular customers, this B&B is visited by the heroines of literature, who come at the most stressful points of their stories. Penny has clear memories of Blanche DuBois and Scarlett O’Hara (who tried to steal their silver). Now, though, Penny is really sick of all the attention her mother gives them – particularly the weepy Deirdre, who’s currently taken over Penny’s own room. Penny snaps. She meets the mysterious Conor in the woods, a Celtic king who claims that Deirdre is his runaway wife and wants her back. When the police get involved, Penny tells them the truth, with predictable results. She meant to hurt her mother – but suddenly, Penny is the heroine in her own story, and things are not going well. This is light and amusing fiction for fans of the classic heroines.
