Book Review: The Narrow Gate

The Narrow Gate. Janet Roberts. BookBaby, October 8, 2015, Trade Paperback and Kindle, 194 pages.

Reviewed by Ray Paul.

Before writing this review, I uncharacteristically read Janet Roberts’ short novel twice from cover to cover. I was driven by two reasons. I loved the flow of her lush prose and I wanted to savor it again. In addition, even though each chapter heading listed the point-of-view character, there were so many different narrators I wanted to make sure I understood how each added to my understanding of the plot. As it turned out, I did not need the second reading because I “got it” the first time. What else I did receive from the second reading was an even greater appreciation of the depth of the author’s prose.

The Narrow Gate is a story about relationships within a large family in a small Western Pennsylvania town. The focus character, Elise, is self-exiled to Long Island. The novel begins and ends when she returns to her hometown for her father’s funeral. During that brief time period, the reader is treated to a psychology handbook full of family love and dysfunction as each relative adds his or her voice. The glory of the writing is that by the end of the story, the reader sees the entire picture and understands the title, The Narrow Gate.

I highly recommend this book by Janet Roberts.

Book Review: The Mystery at Sag Bridge

The Mystery at Sag Bridge. Patricia Camalliere. Amika Press, April 4, 2015, Trade Paperback and Kindle, 328 pages.

Reviewed by Lisa Lickel.

Using a true setting and voices from the past, debut author Patricia Camalliere’s ghost story mixes up sleuthing, a love affair with history, family ties, and some scary activity as an over-protective poltergeist demands justice.

Camalliere’s careful attention to detail and ability to glean historical facts to weave into her imaginative story helps readers live in two worlds. The author adds to the narrative using newspaper articles, diary entries, and letters “written” in the past, as well as modern technology.

The story opens with newly retired and relocated Cora Tozzi on a walk through the woods, a scene filled with hair-raising creepiness, an essence of things to come, and the meaning behind future events that will cause an “aha” moment. Cora is one active lady, and when weird events become more pronounced to those around her, even to the point of harming Cora’s detractors, she realizes a pattern. Protective spirits have always surrounded her—not to prevent attacks but to avenge them. She wonders why her new home brings out increasingly physical emanations. When Cora’s formerly skeptical husband can no longer deny the ghost’s presence, he too must help with the investigation or risk being harmed.

Cora reaches a dilemma, however, once she understands her task. Dealing with the losses of her life and how she handles them, Cora is frightened of what it means to solve a century-old crime and potentially lose her comfortable blanket of otherworldly presence. She must face her own emotional and familial turmoil and come to peace within herself in order to move on and allow the ghost the choice to do so as well.

This story is told in third person through Cora’s voice, as well as a scene or so in her rival’s and her husband’s perspectives and a couple of chapters from the lifetime of the ghost. It is lengthy for a mystery, front-loaded with introspection and a book club's worth of characters from which Cora chooses her sounding board and fellow sleuth. I enjoyed the setting and use of regional history and detail in the story. Those who get a kick out of poltergeist stories will enjoy The Mystery at Sag Bridge.

Book Review: Feng Shui and Charlotte Nightingale

Feng Shui and Charlotte Nightingale. Pam Ferderbar. Three Towers Press (an imprint of HenschelHAUS Publishing), Milwaukee, WI, June 21, 2015, Hardcover and Kindle, 240 pages.

Reviewed by Starza Thompson.

It’s very rare to find a book that is so imaginative that visualizing the characters and places in the book becomes effortless for the reader. In Pam Ferderbar’s Feng Shui and Charlotte Nightingale, the story comes alive. Ferderbar’s novel is imaginative, hilarious, and sweet—a great quick read for anyone who can relate to feeling unlucky, who likes romantic comedies, or who just needs a good laugh.

Charlotte Nightingale isn’t just down on her luck, she is plain unlucky. Her apartment is falling apart; her boyfriend is a liquor-drinking, money-stealing, unemployed womanizer; her car is a piece of junk; and her job at a less-than-reputable car dealership comes with massive abuse from customers and coworkers alike. What’s worse, her sister Charlene seems to have everything Charlotte does not: good looks, a gorgeous doctor for a fiancé, her parents’ devotion and respect, and more. Weirder still, Charlotte’s Chinese-food delivery guy, Kwan, keeps showing up at her apartment uninvited. Little does she know, Kwan is a Feng Shui master. As he quietly unclutters her house, her life seems to change for the better.

Feng Shui and Charlotte Nightingale is Ferderbar’s first novel. The story began as a novella and movie rights to the story sparked a bidding war between movie production companies. She sold the movie rights to New Line Cinema, but in a typical Charlotte-like moment, the executives on her project were fired and her movie was tabled indefinitely. Ferderbar’s book takes the typical romantic comedy/chicklit genre and adds quite a few unexpected twists, making this story both laugh-out-loud funny and heartwarming at the same time.

One of the first of many pleasant surprises in this novel was the use of multiple points-of-view. In many books of this genre, the audience is often confined to the perspective of the female character or her love interest as the story draws the two characters together until their lives intertwine. In Feng Shui and Charlotte Nightingale, we follow three different protagonists: Charlotte, her boyfriend, Frank AKA Joey, and her Chinese delivery person, Kwan. While the male characters are connected to Charlotte, their stories don’t depend on her love or affection. Each character has his own unique purpose in the book outside of helping the female character find love, which is very refreshing.

Further, while there are some elements of love in the story, it isn’t the sole focus of the book. The protagonists display a depth of character beyond who they love and whether or not they end up with their love interests. The characters are quirky and interesting, which makes it easier to fall in love with each of them.

I found only a couple of faults with this novel. First, the secondary characters seem like caricatures of the people they represent. Charlotte’s parents hate Charlotte as much as they love her sister Charlene. Charlotte’s sister is an extremely vapid and selfish Barbie-like girl. Kwan’s father is a disciplinarian who doesn’t like his employees to slack off, and the list goes on. If Ferderbar had spent as much time developing her secondary characters as she did her primary characters, the book would have elevated from a funny rom-com to a quirky and heartwarming masterpiece. Second, I wish the book was longer! At times, it moved too fast. Each chapter could have been a little longer to allow the audience to learn more about Charlotte and the people in her life. At only ~64,000 words, there is some room to add and flesh out the story even more.

Overall, Feng Shui and Charlotte Nightingale is a fantastic read. With surprise twists, imaginative characters, and crack-up funny scenes, this novel has something for every reader. If you are looking for a story that is a little different, and characters that will make you laugh as you fall in love with them, then this is the book for you. I highly recommend Feng Shui and Charlotte Nightingale.

Book Review: A Free, Unsullied Land

A Free, Unsullied Land. Maggie Kast. Fomite Press: Burlington, Vermont, November 1, 2015, Trade Paperback and Kindle, 354 pages.

Reviewed by Marssie Mencotti.

Author Maggie Kast has chosen an interesting time period (1927–1934) and a fifteen-year-old lead character in A Free, Unsullied Land. As Janet Maslin said in her review of The Book Thief in The New York Times, this novel, “ . . . is perched on the cusp between grown-up and young-adult fiction.” Similarly, this coming of age novel covers Henriette Greenberg’s final passage to adulthood and her attempt at developing into an independent woman.

Historical fiction is a broad category, from books narrowly focused on a single event to those that cover a broader swath of time. In this novel, Ms. Kast has selected a seven-year period of American history and unfolds it through the viewpoint of a sheltered, privileged, intelligent, suburban Illinois girl (age 15 to 22). This period of American upheaval includes the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, the Great Depression, the racial tension generated by Scottsboro trials, the rise of the Communist Party, the Labor Union struggles, Hitler’s rise to power, emergent feminism, and other concurrent national social and political issues.

One of the most consistent topics of this novel is the extant double standard between women and men at that time. Her parents’ attitudes vacillate as Henriette is expected to dress and behave a certain way but is generally ignored and allowed to travel anywhere she chooses. In one instance of the lack of attention to female offspring, Henriette’s mother’s friend knows all about Henriette’s twin brothers but had not even heard of her. Henriette is not expected to attend college (her brothers are already attending) and is encouraged to behave in ways that her parents find acceptable for a young lady. She forges ahead, deciding to attend the University of Chicago where her brother is studying medicine.

In the U of C’s simmering stew of politics, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, she finds theories that sometimes shock and sometimes soothe her. She enters psychotherapy as a means of trying to answer her inner questions. The stolid personality of a teaching assistant and friend, Dillard (Dilly) Brannigan, serves to balance out Henriette's naiveté. They move through the days of bathtub gin, jazz, and cultural anthropology looking for answers and love. Again, here we see the double standard. Dilly is portrayed as clear about his life and future while Henriette is uncommitted and behaves more like a dithering child.

Henriette breaks rules, social taboos, and the mores of her time clumsily and without thinking through to the consequences. She is lead astray by selfish desires to push beyond what her parents or brothers would attempt. She sneaks off to Scottsboro, without a plan, on the pretext of finding her friend and suffers the consequences. This is one instance where it is hard for the reader to care about Henriette. She is motivated by a weak desire to do good but cares more about her own selfish curiosity. The internal trajectory of her friend and journalist Nadine’s story seems more interesting than Henriette’s. Later, Henriette’s observation of a Native American ritual enforces her belief in the supernatural. Just when the reader begins to believe that Henriette has reached some sort of maturity, she willfully breaks the cultural boundary, deeply affecting a friend and showing once again that she is still a victim of narrow self-centered thinking.

Henriette reveals herself as an absent friend, a jealous lover, a thoughtless meddler, and an ungrateful daughter. We see her confusion about her sexuality, her opinions, and her future.

She sees herself at the center of everything and only integrates with the emerging times on a superficial level. The device of the “flawed” hero is a dangerous path.  Although there is much to admire about Henriette’s bravado, at book’s end the reader is abruptly left to decide whether she has learned anything from her awkward and sometimes dangerous choices.

This book is effective in keeping the reader involved as we worry about Henriette as she innocently sides with the Communist Party, gets arrested and beaten, and has sex with inappropriate and predatory partners. Issues of lesbianism, homosexuality, a childhood episode of parental abuse, the tension of a Jewish heritage, and the pressure of being a college-educated woman in a time when a woman’s proscribed future held only the prospect of a good marriage remain underdeveloped. However, we still root for Henriette to move her generation forward with more intelligence than what we are shown of her petulant rebellion and flawed intuition.

A Free, Unsullied Land is Maggie Kast’s first novel, although an excerpted story from this novel won a prize in the Hackney Literary Contest and is forthcoming in the Birmingham Arts Journal.   She has published fiction in The Sun, Nimrod, Carve, Paper Street, and others.  She is also a short story writer, a memoirist and an essayist.  She earned her MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Overall, I applaud Ms. Kast’s novel in bringing to life a time of American upheaval and taking the underdeveloped psyche of a young woman through it all. If there is one thing that this novel brought to me as a reader was the astonishing concurrence of so many important historical and cultural events in the decade preceding 1927 that were still unfolding in the years up to 1934 and their impact on the maturing years of a fragile, bright young woman.  

Book Review: The Fifth Floor

The Fifth Floor. Julie Oleszek. Mockingbird Publishing, March 1, 2015, Hardcover, Trade Paperback, and Kindle, 300 pages.

Reviewed by Julie S. Halpern.

Julie Oleszekʼs exceptional first novel, The Fifth Floor, blends 1970s Midwestern nostalgia with harrowing, unexpected tragedy in an intensely readable, lightning-paced debut. With unerring attention to every detail, from the texture and taste from now-extinct candy bars to long-ago pop songs to the race to spear the few precious hotdog pieces embedded among the family’s baked bean dinner, Oleszek draws us into Anna’s world with surprising immediacy.

Anna is the second youngest of ten children in a working-class suburban Chicago family. Her hard-working parents show little outward warmth to their large, energetic brood. Fortunately, Anna’s siblings are loving and close, particularly Anna’s next oldest sister, Liz, who is her constant companion and confidant.

When Liz’s death from a brain tumor coincides with a playground accident, eight-year-old Anna blames herself and begins a terrifying downhill spiral for several years until she nearly starves herself to death. Ultimately committed to a mental health facility, Anna finally gets the treatment she needs. Her progress is rocky and uneven, but, with the support and kindness of other patients and medical professionals, Anna emerges whole and able to resume her life.

Oleszekʼs searing description of medical procedures used to force Anna to eat, from the sickening tastes of the hospital food to solitary confinement when she fails to comply with protocol, are horrific. Details of Anna’s often hostile attitudes towards staff and other patients are unsparing, complete with violence, escape, and resulting loss of freedoms.

Oleszek has created unforgettable images of troubled young people bravely struggling to cope with often brutal and unfair childhoods. Anna’s fellow patients ultimately become close as family members, creating their own unique community. As patientsʼ physical and emotional wounds heal sufficiently for them to leave the hospital, their departure is always unannounced and wrenching, with no addresses or phone numbers exchanged and no way to stay in touch outside this artificial world.

The only issue I have with this remarkable book is the omission of events Anna experiences after her release and return to her former existence. Readers cannot help but be emotionally invested in Anna’s life post treatment, and the short paragraph written ten years later leaves too many questions unanswered about the emotional journey we have weathered along with Anna. While we are grateful for her recovery, we canʼt help but desire more information. But maybe after sharing so many painful revelations, Anna is entitled to her privacy.