fiction

‘How to Behave in a Crowd’ by Camille Bordas

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how-to-behave-in-a-crowd-bordasA novel where everything and nothing is said all at once without the slightest regard for conformity, How to Behave in a Crowd is both a hilarious and gloomy collection of pages.

Author Camille Bordas follows the life of a family in France over the course of a very short time during which a very lot happens. From realized dreams to actualized death, the Mazal family is lost in a tangle of happiness and despair, often without being able to distinguish between the two. Told from the perspective of the youngest of six siblings, Isidore, How to Behave in a Crowd is a novel about so much more than the words let on.

Told in a stark and rather dry tone, Isidore takes on the persona of someone who, despite what the title suggests, often does not know how to behave in a crowd. His thoughts are based in pure reason without much emotion, yet his actions, more often than not, take into account the people around him. He, unlike his brothers and sisters, is not a child prodigy working towards a first or second PhD after skipping years of schooling. Instead, Isidore is the odd one out. The one who infuses compassion into his encounters with others (unlike his siblings), the one who takes everything literally, including the advice given to him by homeless people who are clearly taking advantage of him.

Over the course of the novel, Isidore, sees people he loves achieve their dreams, lose their passion, and sometimes even die. Throughout his experiences, he is always looking at others, always trying to determine their thoughts, always trying to impress them without ever realizing that he has something to offer.

In the end, we can only infer what Isidore has learned from his experiences — as always he won’t really tell us what’s going on in his mind, or maybe he doesn’t know what’s going on beneath the literal thoughts that fill his head, but we know he’s learned something important. Bordas does a beautiful job of portraying the very real experiences of the human condition through the literal, though never static, view of Isidore.

Published by Tim Duggan Books in 2017, How to Behave in a Crowd is available for purchase at your local bookstore.

Read more fiction book reviews at Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

‘Wild Mountain’ by Nancy Hayes Kilgore

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wild-mountain-kilgoreWild Mountain by Nancy Kilgore Hayes tells the story of a small town in Vermont that, in three months time, undergoes enough change, tragedy, and novelty to spark its citizens towards entirely new realms of their lives. From floods to historic bridges being demolished and fission over marriage rights, the townspeople come to know what hardship means not only for themselves, but as a collective people.

Among the citizens of Wild Mountain is Mona, a middle-aged store owner with an abusive ex-husband on the prowl to get her back. Then there’s Frank, Mona’s love interest, also middle aged, though more adventurous and also very in love with Mona. And finally, there is Gus, a recluse who lives on top of a mountain who is convinced that a mother goddess makes the mountain her home as well.

These, amidst others, find adventure, love, and hardship over the three months that Kilgore allows the reader to peer into their lives. Battling demons of both the past and present, all of the citizens of Wild Mountain struggle both together and in opposition to one another. While centering around the demolition of the town’s historic bridge, more elements come to bind and divide Wild Mountain.

Overall, Kilgore tells her story with interest and a clear passion for the spirituality of nature and humankind that she writes about.

Slated for released by Green Writers Press on September 1, 2017, you can preorder a copy of Wild Mountain by Nancy Hayes Kilgore at your local bookstore.

Read more fiction book reviews at Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

‘The Original Ginny Moon’ by Benjamin Ludwig

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the-original-ginny-moonWhat would it be like to be different? Truly different? What would it be like to be loved despite your differences? These questions are the very questions that set the foundation for The Original Ginny Moon by Benjamin Ludwig.

Ginny Moon, the main character is a teenager girl with autism, an adopted teenage girl with autism who is looking for her baby doll. Ginny was taken by social services from her mother when she was nine-years-old after the police stormed her mother Gloria’s apartment and found signs of drug use, abuse, and cat-slaughter. Now, Ginny is living with her Forever Mom and her Forever Dad in her Forever Home. The only problem is, she left her baby doll at Gloria’s.

For five years Ginny has been trying to get back to Gloria. Not really because she loves Gloria, she’s not even sure she knows how to fee love, and she knows that Gloria abused her and that she used to go hungry and get beat up. All the same, though, she has to get back to Gloria’s, because that’s where she left her baby doll when the police came to take her away. She hid her baby doll in a suitcase so it would be safe, but she doesn’t know if anyone ever found it, and she knows Gloria’s not taking care of it, because that was Ginny’s job, and now she’s not doing her job, so she has to go back.

The trouble is, her Forever Family is intent on not letting her get in touch with Gloria. So, years go by, and Ginny does her best to find Gloria, but it’s not until a friend in Room Five, where all the kids who are special go to class, gets on the internet for her and helps her track Gloria down. Now, Ginny is on a mission to get kidnapped by Gloria so she can find her baby doll and make sure it’s getting enough milk and that it’s diapers are getting changed.

A beautiful and soul moving book that shows the truth behind and beyond what it means to have an intellectual disability, The Original Ginny Moon is one of the most important books of our time. Told from Ginny’s perspective, the reader gets so close to Ginny that despite the complete absurdity of her thought process or the danger of her actions, the reader understands, the reader sees it her way, the reader wants her to succeed even though that’s not what the reader wants at all. Ludwig has an amazing ability to draw you in and show you what the world is like from Ginny’s eyes, and it’s so hard to get out, and you don’t want to get out because it’s so sad, and beautiful, and earth shaking.

Ludwig is a master of both language and form in The Original Ginny Moon, juxtaposing perfectly the terse, literalistic prose with an intense and interwoven story of love, betrayal, and redemption. The Original Ginny Moon is an absolute must read. It offers an opening into the world of disabilities that will be hard to ever match.

Slated for release by Park Row Books on May 2, 2017, The Original Ginny Moon is available for preorder at your local bookstore.

Read more fiction book reviews at Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

‘Extraordinary Adventures’ by Daniel Wallace

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extraordinary-adventures-wallaceExtraordinary Adventures is the forthcoming novel from Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish. Wallace brings all the wit, humor, and superb writing style from his former works to Extraordinary Adventures.

Wallace’s main character, Edsel Bronfman is a thirty-four-year-old recluse of sorts. Bronfman has a job, sure, and an apartment of his own, but he has virtually no friends besides his ailing mother. When Bronfman wins a trip to Destin, Florida, though, he begins to make a change, or at least to want to. The thing is that in order to cash in on his trip to Florida, he needs to bring a companion, a romantic companion.

Suddenly, extraordinary things begin happening to Bronfman: he speaks to a woman at the reception desk at his work, his house gets robbed and who appears but yet another woman, a police officer no less. Such out of the ordinary things continue to happen, and Bronfman sees them mostly as acts of destiny, not his own freewill.

The book continues in this manner weaving unforgettable characters in and out of the story. There’s Bronfman’s mother who is suffering from dementia, and who is perhaps the most spectacular character of all. She is a strong willed, oddity of a mother to say the least, her biggest concern always being that her son has fun, messes around with women, and lives his life. There’s also Thomas Edison, Bronfman’s criminal, next-door neighbor, and his cohort of vagabonds and drug addicts. Among them is Coco, a young Japanese girl who Bronfman befriends though he’s sure the woman and has stolen his hat. He’s seen her wear it.

Bronfman himself is often a loveable, pitiful character who the reader cheers for throughout. However, there are aspects of “typical” male behavior that detract from Bronfman’s appeal, especially because they seem so out of character for the kind and caring man. Things like instantly falling for any woman who is pretty. Things like his constant attraction to women even while dating someone else. Though these aspects of Bronfman can be frustrating, if you take a step back and realize the man has never had a serious relationship and thinks every new feeling of lust is love, it’s a bit easier to understand his thoughts and actions.

In sum, Extraordinary Adventures is a fun, fast-paced, and extremely well-written novel.

Slated for release by St. Martin’s Press in May of 2017, you can pre-order your copy of Extraordinary Adventures by Daniel Wallace at your local bookstore.

Read more fiction book reviews at Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

‘The Best of Adam Sharp’ by Graeme Simsion

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the-best-of-adam-sharp-simsionAmazing.

There’s a tendency to leave The Best of Adam Sharp simply there: amazing. Graeme Simsion’s forthcoming novel is more than amazing though. It is beautiful, heart wrenching, nostalgic, and absolutely enthralling.

The Best of Adam Sharp is a story of unrequited love that seems to always be moving in the expected direction until it’s suddenly not. Adam and Angelina found each other in their mid-twenties in Australia and lived out a love affair that only lasted the few months that Adam worked a temp job there. Things never really ended for Adam though, who has thought of Angelina ever since, despite his now twenty year relationship with Claire. Twenty-three years after his relationship with Angelina has ended though, an email message pops up out of the blue from his lost love, and Adam isn’t sure how to respond.

With characters so relatable and problems so palpable, it’s hard not to get drawn into The Best of Adam Sharp immediately. Simsion has a way of making the story more about the human condition than anything else. While not everyone has a lover they wish things would have gone differently with, everybody has regrets, and Simsion doesn’t let readers forget it.

To add to the allure of an already brimming novel, Simsion includes a musical component to The Best of Adam Sharp that adds an extra element of nostalgia. Not only is most of the music from the 1960’s through the 1980’s, but if readers are familiar with the songs that pervade the novel, The Best of Adam Sharp’s soundtrack becomes something that moves the book in an even more emotional direction. Each song that comes up not only fits its scene too perfectly, but if you play it in your mind’s background, the musicality, the movement of the music, fits the mood even more perfectly.

Simsion evokes so much in The Best of Adam Sharp that it’s a challenge to leave the book at the end. You’ll just want more.

Slated for release in May of 2017 by St. Martin’s Press, The Best of Adam Sharp by Graeme Simsion is available for preorder at your local bookstore.

Read more fiction book reviews at Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

‘To the Stars Through Difficulties’ by Romalyn Tilghman

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to-the-stars-through-difficulties-tilghmanTo the Stars Through Difficulties by Romalyn Tilghman is an uplifting story about the strength of collectivity, especially the collective power of women.

To the Stars Through Difficulties follows three different women: Traci, Gayle, and Angelina. Each is dealing with a major life event, or series of life events, that has somehow led them to New Hope, Kansas. Traci has been hired as an artist in residency at the only arts center in New Hope, which also happens to be an old Carnegie library, which Angelina is writing her PhD dissertation on, and which Gayle is attending for therapeutic art classes, provided by Traci. The catch is that Traci has no experience teaching art, though she lied and told the arts center that she did; Gayle’s life was blown away in a tornado and she can’t seem to get her life back together; and Angelina has actually been working on her dissertation for ten years, and the dissertation is going to potentially get dropped by her university.

The Carnegie library turned arts center is the central meeting place not only for these women, but for the ideas that move the book forward. Tilghman weaves together a history of the women who came before Traci, Gayle, and Angelina with the journey of her three protagonists, using the library as the two histories’ point of intersection. In the past, we follow the women who helped make the Carnegie library a reality despite their hard times, while in the present the hardships look a bit different.

Focusing not only on the strength of women but also the power of print and the importance of history, both collective and one’s own, Tilghman leads readers through a maze of mysteries and hardships in To the Stars Through Difficulties.

Slated for release by She Writes Press on April 4, 2017, you can reserve your copy of To the Stars Through Difficulties from your local bookstore.

Read more fiction book reviews at Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

‘Lola’ by Melissa Scrivner Love

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Lola-Scrivner-LoveWhat could a book about gangs, murder, drugs, and rape possible shed new light on in 2017? Besides death, heartbreak, and inequality, it seems like modern day gangster novels don’t tend to give much more. Lola, by Melissa Scrivner Love, though is a whole new kind of gangster novel.

A book in a league all its own, Lola, the main character of the title novel is a character of a similar caliber. An underground gang leader, Lola heads the Crenshaw Six, a small gang in East L.A. that focuses mostly on drug trade and tends to lay pretty low. Until, the Crenshaw Six get a job that could change their entire trajectory and all of its members’ destinies, especially Lola’s.

The neighborhood of Huntington Park thinks that Garcia, Lola’s boyfriend, is the leader of the Crenshaw Six, and Lola struggles constantly to deal with both the perks and the frustration of leading a gang from behind the scenes. Lola is unintimidating, she can easily make her way into important places without being suspect, she can sit down with a man and make him feel like he’s in power simply by virtue of being a woman. It’s part of how Lola has made her way so high into the gang, but it’s also something that infuriates her. She wants to have an equal: someone who not only she sees that way, but that sees her as an equal as well. That seems an impossible feat when every other leader is a man and that somehow makes them more than her.

In fact, Lola itself is a feminist calling to reevaluate the way women are perceived in society: weak, small, and incapable of little else than cleaning floors. Lola does her best to defy these stereotypes while also constantly finding herself bogged down by them. Every time she cooks meal, cleans a floor, feels compassion, she chides the thought that she’s only doing it because she’s a woman, not because she’s a person. For every woman who finds serious issue with the gender norms of our time, Lola is a hero of sorts.

What makes Lola so magical and the reader feel so connected to her, despite her tendencies to cut off fingers and shoot people in the head, is that she leads from a moral compass, even if slightly skewed. She’s a feminist, she cares for the innocent people around her and for those who are loyal. She is disdainful of drug addicts, but adoring of children. Most of Lola’s morals make up the remaining themes and messages of Lola the book. Issues of race, inequality, injustices, parenting, and the meaning of love are just a few of the deeper themes that run through the pages of Lola.

Love’s only slip up comes in the form of her point of view. Mainly the book is told in a close third person point of view with Lola leading the way but the narration coming from an unknown third party. However, there are times where head hopping can throw the reader for a loop. Suddenly we are inside of another character’s head who we’ve potentially never even met, feeling what he feels and understanding his motives in a way we probably shouldn’t. Usually Love sticks with Lola and makes it clear that even evaluations of other characters are Lola’s, and that makes those evaluations even more valuable and interesting. Nevertheless, the slip ups can be a bit distracting for readings watching closely.

Overall, Lola is a fantastic and riveting book that will keep you reading all the way to the end. Just the right mixture of violence and terror, Lola is not overly graphic and though violent, it is never gratuitous.

Lola by Melissa Scrivner Love is slated for release by Crown Publishing on March 21, 2017. You can preorder a copy from your local bookstore today.

Read more fiction book reviews at Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

 

‘Mexico’ by Josh Barkan

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mexico-barkanMexico by Josh Barkan is a series of epic, terrifying accounts of the lives of Mexico’s citizens. Told in a series of short stories, Mexico follows a host of different narrators, from gangsters to victims. The stories all revolve around crime, usually involving drugs, extortion, and often murder. What strangely ties all of the stories together though, beyond their setting, is their endings. Each narrative closes with a message of hope, or at least a glimmer of it, despite the tragedy that ensued for the pages of that story.

Some memorable characters include the drug lord’s abused wife who gives hope to a woman about to lose her breasts to a mastectomy, the famous, philandering painter who is turned honest by an encounter with a gangster who sells drugs to the painter’s daughter, and the young boy whose mother sacrifices her dignity to bring her son to America and out of the family’s gang-ridden neighborhood.

Each of these stories includes hardship and often a main character who is difficult to like at first. However, by the end of each story, the protagonist has learned something from the horror she’s experienced and claims that she will life a better life because of her experience. It is slightly suspicious that the reader never sees any of these characters actually enact these assertions; though, there is at least the idea of change planted at each stories end. Whether the characters follow through with the aspirations they’ve set for themselves is up to the reader to decide.

While Mexico is beautifully written and the characters utterly enthralling, where the novel falls short is in its untimely release. At a time of political turmoil, when those people who represent the United States are claiming that Mexico is nothing but a drug-ridden war zone, the last thing the public needs is a book that claims just that. I admit that there is an air of redemption for each character, but this does not go for the country as a whole. Rather, Barkan almost seems to suggest that the people of his narrative are redeemable, but the country is not.

Mexico is enthralling, captivating, and chilling, looking at a side of humanity that is often ignored.

Released by Crown Publishing January of 2017, Josh Barkan’s Mexico is available for purchase at your local bookstore.

Read more fiction book reviews at Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

‘The Cauliflower’ by Nicola Barker

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the-cauliflower-barkerThe Cauliflower by Nicola Barker is a semi-biographical, spiritually investigative, and entirely comedic novel about the Hindu Swami Sri Ramakrishna, about religion in general, and about perspective.

The Cauliflower is told from a variety of perspectives and from a multitude of vantage points. Spanning a wide cast of characters, all who have some form of contact with Sri Ramakrishna, the book does not follow a conventional biographical telling, instead, the various narrators skip through years out of sequential order but in an order that reveals more about the characters themselves.

While The Cauliflower is a biographically fictional story of Sri Ramakrishna and his rise to “fame,” Barker also investigates interlaying themes that extend beyond the simple telling of this one particular story. The nature of reality of the ability to clearly define anything is a theme that recurs throughout The Cauliflower in a variety of ways. In fact, the reader is made to question what exactly this book is: is it a book, a biography, a newspaper report. At one point, Barker raises the question herself, “Is this book a farce, a comedy, a tragedy, or a melodrama?” Though she does not answer her own question, it appears by the end, that The Cauliflower, and by extension life, must be all three.

Another related theme is the meaning of veracity and certainty, particularly as it relates to religion and perspective. As mentioned above, The Cauliflower is told from different perspectives, but the reader can’t be certain who is telling the truth or what “truth” even means in the novel. Many of the characters disagree on certain events or even on descriptions of other characters; but further, the characters also disagree with themselves. Barker seems to beg the question, what is truth when we all are standing in, and coming from, different places – even if we are all seeing the same thing? This metaphor is extended to religion, and not only the Hindu religion that Sri Ramakrishna inhabits, but all religions.

Though The Cauliflower is a bit slow in the beginning because the reader needs to meet and become accustomed to not only the numerous characters and perspectives, but also the general layout of the book as rather disoriented, once it does pick up speed, it is hard to put down. Overall, this journalistic, meta-reality novel is a beautiful and comedic look into the intricacies and complication involved in living life, following religion, and finding peace with perspective.

The Cauliflower by Nicola Barker was released in 2016 by Henry Holt & Company and is available for purchase at your local bookstore.

Read more fiction book reviews at Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

‘The Impossible Fortress’ by Jason Rekulak

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the-impossible-fortress-rekulakThe Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak is a story of fourteen-year-old love in the late 1980’s: mostly love of girls and computers.

Billy Marvin is a fourteen-year-old closet videogame designer who is failing all of his classes because he spends all of his time in front of his Commodore 64. Billy is content programming and playing his own video games while failing his classes and talking about women’s breasts with his two best friends, that is until he meets Mary Zelinksy. Mary is the daughter of the local convenient store owner, and it is Mary who tells Billy about a video game design contest for kids under 18. Billy couldn’t be more excited, except for the fact that Mary tells him this while he is in the middle of trying to buy a Playboy magazine from Mary’s father. Needless to say, he leaves without the Playboy.

After this life changing event, Billy is pulled into a game of lies and deceit as he simultaneously tries to program a game with Mary, plot a plan to steal the Playboy magazine from Mary’s father’s store, and all while trying to keep his grades up. The life of a fourteen-year-old nerd.

While Rekulak does a fantastic job of keeping readers engaged and on their toes with his fast-paced prose and continual plot wrenches, where he falls short is with his gender normed stock characters who uphold all the worst and most common gendered stereotypes. Rekulak seems to argue that all young boys are horn dogs and all women care about is making themselves look good and getting laid.

Part of the issue is that Billy is telling the story from the future. So, not only at fourteen did he have the thoughts and desires in his head that he did, but looking back on it twenty odd years later, Billy thinks boys are just boys and they all think the same – they’re all jerks. Though Billy, and even some other characters, have a few redeeming qualities, overall their blanket stereotypical actions detract from the reader’s ability to ever get very close to them.

The Impossible Fortress will be released by Simon and Schuster on February 7, 2017. You can preorder a copy at your local bookstore today.

Read more fiction book reviews at Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.