[The] Position by Meg Wolitzer (9/06-PC)
Summary
Sex, love, the 1970s, and one extraordinary family that lived to tell the tale.
Crackling with intelligence and original humor, The Position is a masterful take on sex and the suburban American family at the hilarious height of the sexual revolution and throughout the thirty-year hangover that followed. Meg Wolitzer, the author of the much-acclaimed novel The Wife (named a notable book of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Newsday), takes another huge step forward with this new book and showcases her distinctive voice, pitch-perfect observations, electric wit, and depth of emotion.
In 1975, suburban parents Paul and Roz Mellow write a Joy of Sex-type book called Pleasuring: One Couple's Journey to Fulfillment, which becomes a surprise runaway bestseller. The Position opens with the four Mellow children, aged six to fifteen, at the moment when they see the mortifying book (and the graphic, pastel illustrations of their parents' creative, vigorous lovemaking) for the very first time -- an experience that will forever complicate their ideas about sex, parents, families, and themselves. The book brings a strange celebrity and small fortune ("sex money" the children call it) to the Mellows and ultimately changes the shape of the family forever.
Thirty years later, as the now-dispersed family members argue about whether to reissue the book, we follow the complicated lives of each of the grown children as they confront their own struggles with love, work, sex, death, and the indelible early specter of their erotically charged parents.
Some novels are about family, and others are about sex. The Position is about sex within the context of a family. Insightful, witty, panoramic, and heartbreaking, it is a compulsively readable novel about an eternally mystifying subject: how a group of people growing up in one house can become so very different from one another. (From the publisher.)
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver (10/06-PE)
Summary
Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches the forest from her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and confound her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the complexities of a world neither of them expected.
Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes a green and profligate countryside, these characters find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one part of life on earth.
With the richness that characterizes Barbara Kingsolver's finest work, Prodigal Summer embraces pure thematic originality and demonstrates a balance of narrative and ideas that only an accomplished novelist could render so beautifully.
Good Night Nobody by Jennifer Weiner (11/06-JD)
Summary
Best-selling author Jennifer Weiner returns with Goodnight Nobody, a suburban mystery full of Weiner's wit and wisdom. The novel's protagonist, Kate Klein Borowitz, and her husband, Ben, are recent transplants to Upchurch, Connecticut, following a mugging on the streets of New York City. A Connecticut housewife who takes mommy-and-me pilates classes and drives the requisite minivan, Kate cannot quite seem to break into the club of "supermommies" who populate her town, Upchurch. Kate's life suddenly takes an interesting turn when she discovers her neighbor, Kitty Cavanaugh, stabbed to death. Kate's former life as a celebrity gossip columnist suddenly becomes relevant as she launches a one-woman crusade to solve the mystery of Kitty's killing.
As Kate delves further into the details of Kitty's death and into the disappearance of Lexi Hagen-Holt, one of the town's "supermommies," her marriage begins to fail. And if solving a murder and a missing person case were not enough to keep her busy, Kate's twin boys and five-year-old daughter, Sophie, monopolize the rest of her time. Nevertheless, Kate soldiers on and uncovers evidence of Kitty's secret life. She is surprised to learn that she and Kitty share a common acquaintance—New York detective Evan McKenna, who just happens to be a former fling of Kate's.
As the result of her own unofficial investigation, Kate discovers that Kitty was a ghostwriter for Laura Lynn Baird, a popular television star. In fact, Kitty had penned the equally popular newspaper column "The Good Mother" for which Baird had received credit. In addition, Kitty had a book deal in the works that would have made her even wealthier than she already was. Kate is determined to solve Kitty's murder, and to do so she enlists her friend Janie. Throughout the investigation, what shocks Kate the most is how much she and Kitty seemed to have had in common.
Published in 2005, Goodnight Nobody is Weiner's fourth novel. Before desperate housewives were in vogue, Weiner devised the perfect prototype in Kate Klein Borowitz. The book explores familiar Weiner themes—motherhood, missed opportunities, marriage—and also celebrates the juggling act that so many women must manage in their lives.
Wicked by Gregory Maguire (1/07-KH)
Summary
When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious Witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil?
Gregory Maguire creates a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again. Wicked is about a land where animals talk and strive to be treated like first-class citizens, Munchkinlanders seek the comfort of middle-class stability, and the Tin Man becomes a victim of domestic violence. And then there is the little green-skinned girl named Elphaba, who will grow up to become the infamous Wicked Witch of the West, a smart, prickly, and misunderstood creature who challenges all our preconceived notions about the nature of good and evil.
The Last Time They Met by Anita Shreve (3/07-LM)
Summary
Linda Fallon encounters her former lover, Thomas Janes, at a literary festival where both have been invited to give readings from their work. It has been years since their paths crossed, and in that time Thomas has become a kind of literary legend. His renown is enhanced by his elusiveness; for most of the past decade, he has remained in seclusion following a devastating loss.
This is no chance meeting. Thomas learned that Linda was reading at the festival and chose this moment to reestablish contact with a woman he passionately pursued years earlier. Their affair was disastrous, and a turning point in both their lives. Neither the intensity of their relationship nor the damage it did has ever been far from his memory. From the moment they speak, The Last Time They Met unfolds the story of Linda and Thomas in an extraordinary way: it travels back into their past, bypassing layers of memory and interpretation to present their earlier encounters with unshakable immediacy. In Africa, when Linda and Thomas were twenty-seven, and in Massachusetts, when they were in high school, the novel re-creates love at its exhilarating pinnacle - the kind of intense connection that becomes the true north against which all relationships are measured. Moving backward through time, The Last Time They Met traces the extraordinary resonance a single choice, even a single word, can have over the course of a lifetime. At the same time, the novel creates an almost unbearable mystery, a mystery that can only be understood fully in the novel's final pages, in the eyes of young Linda Fallon and the young man who loves her.
With a master's control of phrase, observation, emotion, and character, Anita Shreve has written a beautiful and unforgettable exploration of intimacy, loss, and lifelong desire.
Marley and Me by John Grogan (4/07-LAB)
Summary
Told in first-person narrative, the book portrays Grogan and his family's life during the thirteen years that they lived with their dog Marley, and the relationships and lessons from this period. Marley, a yellow Labrador Retriever, is described as a high-strung, boisterous, and somewhat uncontrolled dog. He is strong, powerful, endlessly hungry, eager to be active, and often destructive of their property (but completely without malice). Marley routinely fails to "get the idea" of what humans expect of him; at one point, mental illness is suggested as a plausible explanation for his behavior. His acts and behaviors are forgiven, however, since it is clear that he has a heart of gold and is merely living within his nature.
During his escapades he makes a two-minute credited appearance in the movie The Last Home Run (filmed in 1996 and released in 1998).
The strong contrast between the problems and tensions caused by his neuroses and behavior, and the undying devotion, love and trust shown towards the human family as they themselves have children and grow up to accept him for what he is, and their grief when he finally dies from gastric dilatation volvulus (a stomach torsion condition) in old age,[1] form the backdrop for the biographical material of the story.
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards (6/07-MB)
Summary
This stunning novel begins on a winter night in 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins.
His son, born first, is perfectly healthy, but the doctor immediately recognizes that his daughter has Down syndrome. For motives he tells himself are good, he makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives forever. He asks his nurse, Caroline, to take the baby away to an institution. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child as her own. Compulsively readable and deeply moving, The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a brilliantly crafted story of parallel lives, familial secrets, and the redemptive power of love.
