Plainsong
Kent Haruf
320 pp.
December 2007
The title of this book is beautifully apt for a story set on the great plains: musically, plainsong is an unadorned melodic line. Haruf's novel, then, is a plainsong—in terms of his taut, straight-forward prose; his unadorned but compelling characters; and the austerity of his setting.
Plainsong is also a hymn of praise. And Haruf's story becomes a paean to the power of place and to the capacity of individuals to transcend loneliness and despair, coming together in community.
The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute
to His White Mother
James McBride 1996
362 pp.
November 2007
For years James McBride was puzzled, even slightly repulsed, by his mother. She was strange.
The mother of 12 African-American children, she rode a bicycle, spoke Yiddish and was, as she put it, "light skinned." She evaded any question about her background with "God made me." She was, in fact, far stranger than McBride suspected.
Can't Wait to Get to Heaven
Fannie Flagg, 2006
375 pp.
October 2007
You can't help but love this book. It's warm, funny, and at times a real belly-guffaw. While not a "social novel" in the true literary sense, it's close enough for our "Lighter Touch" novel.
Flagg returns her readers to Elmwood Springs, a small tightly-knit community in Missouri, whose residents fret and scramble and cogitate when one of their own lies near death...or is dead... or hangs somewhere in between.
The War Against Miss Winter
Kathryn Miller Haines, 2007
317 pp.
September 2007
Rosie Winter is a master of the cool quip and cocky comeback—trademarks of the "hard-boiled" detective genre of the 1920's and '30's. Conjure up an image of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, correct for gender by tossing in Rosalind Russell from His Girl Friday, and you've got Rosie.
She's the smart and smart-mouthed heroine of this clever new crime story set in New York against the backdrop of World War II. In fact, war and violence are played out everywhere in this story: on the world stage, the New York stage, and in Rosie's life.
Bridget Jones's Diary
Helen Fielding, 1998
271 pp.
August 2007
Quintessential "chick-lit," Bridget Jones is a romp of a read, a modern send-up of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Yet when it comes to her main character, Helen Fielding departs from her literary model—Bridget is one of literature's silliest, most hapless heroines. Elizabeth Bennett, she's not.
Aside from Bridget's self-deprecating voice, her fruitless attempts at self-improvement, her friends, her mother, her job, her boss...the great fun of this book is to find its parallel points with Austen's P & P.