Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

I loved this book.  It actually reminded me of Thomas Hardy (like Tess of the D'Urbervilles, there's a very important letter to a beloved that tragically gets very, very lost and, like Jude the Obscure, there's a tragedy that is devastating and, aside from the rising misery factor, seems to come out of the blue) in more than one way.  I also was deeply impressed by the way the author conveyed his love of medicine.

I like the idea of people loving their work.  That interests me.

There's a lot of tragedy and loss in this book, but there's also a lot of wonderful stuff like characters that are very romantic and noble and self-sacrificing.  Oh, I cried at the end!

Again, I read so much stuff about which I feel lukewarm, at best.  I'm just thrilled to have read something that I loved.

I read this book for a reading group, and while two of the others loved it as I did, one member of the group was very direct about the fact that she did not - she found it heavy.

Trying to think of what she means, exactly, reminds me that I was in another group where the topic veered off to other books and writers and someone brought up Maeve Binchy and another person said, impatiently, "Oh, her descriptions are too long - when I come to one of them I just skip it."  Wow, I said to myself.  I never thought of Binchy as a wordy writer.  I'm telling you, it's brutal out there with the readers who don't want their writers to offer them too many words!

What I'm Reading Now

For the moment, I've given up on everything but trying to finish Cutting for Stone which I love.  It has an operatic, John Steinbeck's East of Eden quality .. it is a bildungsroman/family saga, and its has a poetic and sensual view of medicine.  It makes medicine seem deeply exciting. 

The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis

This is a suspense novel, set in Denmark.  It was written by two Danish women who were already published authors in other genres, and, being friends, decided to work together to write this book.

The plot revolves around a three-year old Lithuanian boy who has been kidnapped - he's the boy in the suitcase.

Initially, one focus is on the boy's mother who was attacked by the kidnappers and who awakens in the hospital disoriented and unable to convince anyone that her child has been kidnapped.

The other thread of the narrative is on a nurse who works with abused women.  She finds the child in the suitcase, and her efforts to save this child form the other major thread of the narrative.

Eventually, we meet the couple who kidnapped the child and the two narratives merge in climax at a Danish home.

The reason for the child's kidnapping is horrific.

I liked this book because it was very well plotted and the characters, although not equally developed, did not seem flat.  It worked as a general novel as well as a suspense novel

It was easy to read and held my interest; I read it in one sitting.

5/11/14

My book group read this book and to my surprise, everyone liked it.  They really liked Nina.  And, we all agreed that the characterization was rich.  One thing several people mentioned was the fact that they kept feeling afraid for Nina and wanted to know why she just didn't go to the police?  and, what was she thinking, leaving a child in hot car?  The child could have died!  (One or two former nurses in my book group.)

I posited that Nina was feeling mistrustful of the "authorities" because of her inability to protect the Ukrainian girl who was picked up by her abuser at the Nina's workplace at the beginning of the novel. The man engaged in an sexual display that was designed to make Nina feel uncomfortable and helpless, which it did.  That was my explanation for why Nina didn't call the police.  But no one in my book group was persuaded by that explanation.

I really liked the book even more after hearing all of the others in my book group talk about how much they liked it.

The second book in the Nina Borg series is Invisible Murder; the third book in the series is Death of a Nightingale.

What I'm reading now

I have four books on my docket, and I wonder if I will get any of them read:

Sutton, by J.R. Moehringer, for a book group; Cutting for Stone, for a book group; Inferno by Dan Brown, and Five Days at Memorial:  Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital   by Sheri Fink.

For a book group, I recently read The Boy in the Suitcase, a suspense novel which I honestly enjoyed; I thought it was well-crafted.  

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

This book was another debut novel, one that was hugely popular in Britain and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.  The author, Rachel Joyce, wrote it while her father was dying and it's easy to see how the long walk of the protagonist, who believes that it will prevent his friend from dying until he can arrive to see her, was inspired by the deals and wishes we irrationally make when our loved ones are dying.

I did not finish this book, and perhaps I would have loved it if I had.  As it was, it seemed to me a strange combination of whimsy and despair.  I simply never felt really engaged; again, I thought the mild-mannered, hen-pecked husband who rebels by doing some eccentric is a cliche and while I felt that the novel obliquely raised serious issues like grief and mental illness it didn't seem to me to say anything new or profound - nothing that would gave me that sense of immediate recognition.

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

This is a combination dystopian/coming-of-age novel.

The story is told by an adult who is recalling the year she was 11, when the earth started slowing.  That is, the days became longer until they were finally about 48 hours long and many animals and plants died.  Food production was moved into greenhouses, and the additional energy consumption of these greenhouses led to electricity shortages and rolling blackouts.

A lot of folks, including folks in the book group I read this with, really liked this novel.

I didn't like this novel.  I found the characterizations flat, or perhaps simply not original enough.

For instance, the one commenter noted that the California setting was informed by the author's own California childhood.  I didn't derive a strong sense of place from this novel.

During the first year of the slowing, the narrator falls in love and observes her mother's illness and the stress it places on her parents' marriage.

I think I felt that the novel was full of recycled elements:  I'd call it To Kill a Mockingbird meets Nevil Shute's On the Beach.

This is this author's debut novel, and I thought the prose was well written.  I understand that she wrote the novel at home in the mornings before she went to work and on the subway.  In short, it's a tremendous achievement that she was able to finish the novel.   She says that it was inspired by learning the 2004 tsunami slowed the earth's rotation by a few microseconds.  Of course, as global warming creates ever more extreme weather, it seems likely that something like that could happen again, perhaps periodically.

She says that she did not write the book about global warming and that it was not inspired by global warming, but it reminded me of the very great fear I have that we are not doing anything yet about global warming and there is no advantage to waiting.

The "age of miracles" to which the title refers is the onset of adolescence.

The Cooked Seed by Anchee Min

I just loved this book; I didn't really have time to read it but I made time.

I have so much to say about this book although my thoughts are disparate and disjointed.

Anchee Min owned a four-flat in Bridgeport with her husband.  Her tales of fixing up her building are really scary and inspiring.  And, yes, if you're angry at your spouse but you want to feel better about him/her by reading about someone else who's worse off, then yes, this is the book for you.  Her husband is now a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (where they met), but she found fault with the way that he handled managing their apartment building and the way he parented their child.

(It's an interesting commentary on the immigrant experience; Anchee could not get a job because her English wasn't good enough and she had to remain a student in order to keep her visa.  This is why she and her husband wanted to own real estate; they hoped it would be a source of income.  (Their experience was that maintaining the building ate up all the rent income.)

As much as I have always wanted to read a "real estate memoir," the last few chapters of the book are the ones that I like best.

The significance of the title is that cooked seed is what her colleagues at the film company she worked for before she left China used to call her.  Her parents were teachers and victims of the Cultural Revolution; at the age of 17 she was given a job as an actor in a film company run by Madame Mao.

When Mao died and Madame Mao was denounced, Min was tainted by the association and her colleagues jeered her by calling her "cooked seed" which meant washed up, finished, "stick a fork in her, she's done".  After working very hard to keep her job for several years, she finally decided that she had to leave China.

Toward the end of the book, she gives her daughter a lecture about "gaming the system."  Of course, she herself gamed the system:  she lied about being able to speak English when she applied for her visa from the American consulate (another story that I love:  a Chinese worker there, with haughty disdain, informs her that she got lucky:  the consular official who interviewed her realized that she could not speak English but greatly admired her pluck and said "yes").  She goes on to struggle to explain the real cost of poverty, the poverty of spirit that envelops those trapped in it.

The real appeal of this memoir is Min's "grit."  I thought that she was just as determined as the heroine of "True Grit" and thought that that might make a very nice alternative title to this book.  I was so impressed by her strength. Interestingly, I don't think she saw herself as strong but as desperate.  And, she's very candid about her doubts and about how they affected her relationship with her mother.

In fact, I'm not sure I fully understand everything that she has to say about her relationship with her mother, but I felt that she felt hurt that she could not be honest about her struggles in America because it was important to her mother that she be a "success."  At the same time, I think that she judged her parents for how they struggled when she was a child and, of course, I think anyone confronting the harsh conditions of the Cultural Revolution was lucky to survive but probably wouldn't feel lucky.  And one of the delights of the book is her gift to her mother of a toilet.

One of the other delights of the book is her account of how she met her husband. I won't spoil it for you by telling you the story, but I found it not just affecting, but expertly told.  Min writes that she had struggled as a writer in English, not just to master the mechanics but to create prose that flowed as the best prose does.  I congratulate her; while her prose is spare it is excellent and serves her narrative well.

Min writes that her daughter prompted her to write this memoir, saying that it would inspire women in a similar situation.  She closes the book with a quotation from Jane Eyre:

What I'm reading now

It is an eclectic group of items, and anybody's guess as to whether I'll finish them all, ever ..

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (some beautiful prose)

The Age of Miracles (middle school, when puberty suddenly kicks in)

The Cooked Seed by Anchee Min (she left China; she came to live in Bridgeport)

Six Years by Harlan Coben

Page turner, although for me, not as much of a page turner as And the Mountains Echoed.  

Whether deliberately or not, there was a lot of "echoing" in this book as well; the protagonist, in his investigation, visited the same places repeatedly.

Interesting to choose a poli sci professor as a protagonist.

Interesting to read a book that seemed to be a guy's book.

Two escapes from a window in this book.

I did think that the book dragged toward the end.  I found myself thinking it could be, perhaps should be, 50 pages shorter.

Characters were not well developed, I thought; you don't learn anything about the protagonist's childhood and life before the events of the novel are set in motion.

The "mystery" surrounding so many characters tended to ensure that there wouldn't be much in the way of characterization.

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

I really enjoyed this book:  thought it grabbed your attention right off, was a quick read, had an interesting and engaging narrative structure, and had some interesting things to say about caretaking.

Newsroom and Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist

Earlier this week I saw Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist.

I've heard folks say that the genre of romantic comedy is dead, because the relationships between men and women are no fraught that's it's hard to find humor.  I thought this romantic comedy was charming and I wonder if that fact that the couple is still in high school makes it easier to believe.  Of course, all the action in Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist takes place in 24 hours!

I saw Newsroom for the first time this week (the first season is out on DVD, and it stars Emily Mortimer and and I thought that the acting was fantastically good at times.  The premise, of course, is absurd.  But, it's a feel-good romp - another romantic comedy.  And the act of viewing a fictional universe where people talk about doing things well simply because they can is deeply wish fulfilling.  

Liverpool Fantasy by Larry Kirwin

Larry Kirwan must be a very interesting man; he's written a very interesting book.

Mr. Kirwan is the leader of a New York Irish-American band called Black 47; he was born in Wexford.  Their records are available on Amazon.com.  He's also the host of a radio show called Celtic Crush.

Liverpool Fantasy is alternative history of the Beatles, and of Britain, one in which John Lennon has a disagreement with George Martin and stomps out of a recording session in 1963 (or 1962?  can't keep those dates from the dawn of time straight).  George and Ringo follow him out; Brian Epstein continues to manage Paul McCartney's career, taking him to America where he becomes Paul Montana, king of the Vegas showrooms.

In Larry's alternative reality, Lennon is threatened by the National Front, a paramilitary fascist organization that is part of a Tory coalition government. Lennon's son, Julian, is an "up and coming" captain in this organization.

This is a dystopian novel, and the fictional characters Kirwan has created are quite different in some ways than their real-life counterparts.  The fictional Lennon is a kind of cartoon character, a kind of caricature.

As a writer, Kirwan endlessly displays his fandom knowledge; he does have a tendency to place lyric fragments in characters' mouths, and that is a fictional practice of which I disapprove.  In my experience, our speech is very much influenced by what we read and hear, but no one I've ever met talks like this.  It's all a display of cleverness:  the concept, the execution, the expert fandom; to put lyric fragments in characters' mouths is inconsistent with the rest of the piece, distracting, and analagous to breaking the fourth wall: it reminds that you are consuming a piece of fiction instead of allowing you to experience the world of the novel.

I was amazed that Kirwan managed to incorporate a reference to Mr. Acker Bilk into his novel; I found myself wondering at times if I, playing along at home, should be assigning bonus points for the most obscure references.  If I thought of something that Mr. Kirwan didn't, should I award points to myself?

Kirwan is also a writer who surrounds his dialogue with a great deal of stage direction.  This reminds me of my friend who dismissed Faithful Place, saying, "Too many words!"  It's a cliche, but true:  there is much to be said for economy.

Nevertheless, I admire Kirwin for his daring and passion in reimagining such famous lives.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

I loved the twist in this novel.  The premise seems "ripped from the headlines," and with the familiarity of the story comes a some certainty about the ending.

I expected a series of revelations.  I did not expect the big twist more than halfway through the book, which I found delightful in part because so unexpected.

The tone of the novel begins to shift at that point and I wonder if other readers begin to feel that the end of the novel doesn't quite match the beginning.

I was part of a book group that discussed this book, and I was very surprised that the group seemed a) not to like the book; b) think the author had some serious psychological problems; and c) not be interested in considering what the story has to say about marriage or about the way that our perception of the world is shaped by our experience of TV and movies and of the news (which is, in turn, shaped by TV and movies).

I knew from reading an interview with the author online that she consciously sought to use the suspense story as a vehicle for talking about marriage, and for blending the genre of suspense and women's fiction.  That made me think that it was a legitimate topic for discussion but it didn't interest any one else there.

Nevertheless, I have to admire this book for the twist!

The Light Between Two Oceans by M.L. Stedman

This book is currently on the NYT bestseller list; I read it for a book group.

Stedman is an Australian who's lived in Britain for some years (I honestly can't remember how many); this is her debut novel and there was a bidding war among British publishers for it.

I see this book as Anna Karenina meets the two entrepreneurs of Solomon.  I have not read Anna Karenina for many years, but I recall it as an psychological exploration and explanation of how a married woman could come to break her marriage vows by someone who viewed that as clearly wrong and almost inexplicable.  This novel also examines how a great crime came to be committed by people who were otherwise normal and law-abiding (albeit living under great stress).   It's also a portrait of loss, as there are many losses and bereavements in the novel.

A WWI vet, deeply troubled by his wartime experience as well as the breakdown of his parents' marriage, welcomes a posting to man the lighthouse at Janus Rock, a several hour boatride from the nearest southwestern Australia town.

The two oceans referred to are the Indian Ocean, along Australia's western shore, and the Southern Ocean, the body of water between Australia and Antarctica.  The place where the two oceans meet at the southwest corner of Australia is a place of strong, treacherous currents.

In town, before his posting, the vet meets a lively and attractive young woman.  Having lost both her brothers to the war, she not only is immediately attracted to the lighthouse keeper but feels that her life has shown her the importance of not wasting any time.

She pursues him, they marry, and she goes to live with him on Janus Rock.  After several painful miscarriages, a baby in a boat washes ashore and the wife insists that she and her husband keep the child and pass it off as their own rather than report the event to the authorities, as is customary and required.

With grave misgivings, her husband, who not only loves her but credits her with saving him after the emotional numbness he felt after the war, agrees.  As the years pass, guilt gnaws at him.

The child's mother leaves in the same town from which the lighthouse receives its supplies, and it's perhaps obvious that it's just a matter of time until the lighthouse keeper meets the mother of his adopted child and is confronted with her loss and suffering.

This book is beautifully written.  I disliked that the author sometimes told the reader something that I hope could be inferred, such as that it was easy, in the isolation of life at the lightouse, to imagine that there would no harm caused by keeping the baby.

In the opening of the novel, the author describes the founding of the town near Janus Rock, as if that town's history, too, were part of the story of this baby and all the people who loved her.

The Gift by Danielle Steel

I chose this book to read because Danielle Steel is enormously popular with some folks and I chose this title in particular because I'd been told by someone I can't remember now that this was one of her better books.

In this book, a very close-knit and happy family is devastated by loss when their 5-year-old daughter dies of illness.  The marriage is strained; the lost child's brother starts taking his suppers at a local diner because his mother never cooks any more.

At the diner, he meets a young waitress.

Her story is that she went to prom, and her date got drunk, and somebody else took her home - and he knocked her up.

Her dad goes ballistic and insists that she go to a convent-run home for unwed mothers.  She can't stand it, and she decides to take a bus anywhere, as long as it's somewhat far from home.

The first stop the bus makes on her journey is a truck stop where a sign in the window advertises that the restaurant is looking for a waitress.  She applies and is hired.

The two young people fall in love and what is interesting about the female character is how very level-headed and restrained she is.  And, while she is not going to school, she keeps up her studies so that she can graduate on time.  I am very impressed; I wouldn't begin to know what to do to keep up with my studies in a similar situation.  I'd probably just read nineteenth-century novels and discuss Anna Karenina with bartenders.  I mean, wouldn't you?

City of Falling Angels by John Berendt

I loved this book by John Berendt about Venice in the aftermath of the fire at La Fenice, the Venice opera house.

While I was listening to it, I had a nagging feeling .. why, I kept asking myself, does this all seem so familiar?

Well, one obvious answer is that I'd read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, his account of a scandalous murder trial in Savannah, Georgia that became a runaway nonfiction hit (kind of a rare animal), as well as a film by Clint Eastwood.  That book also featured a cast of eccentrics and a city members reacting to threats to the city's traditions and cultural assets.

But another, more basic reason, is that the swirling speculation about the causes of the La Fenice fire reminded me so much of Michael Dibdin's Ratking.

Berendt also writes at length about James's the Aspern Papers, which is still vaguely familiar to me from having read it in college.  The connection is that James based his story on having heard a similar real life story of Claire Clarmont, the half-sister of Mary Shelley and the lover of Lord Byron, surviving to the ripe old age of 80 in Florence.  Of course, James changed the setting to Venice, which conveys with it a sense both of beauty and decay.

I had a profound sense of having been there before; and I loved it.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Neuromancer was a novel that I knew was assigned reading in some Humanities courses, and this is what led me to want to read it.  It wasn't held in the print collection of my library so I checked it out on audiobook.

Listening to Neuromancer as an audiobook is especially difficult because it makes the story that much harder to follow; Gibson is given to abrupt juxtapositions and changes of scene.  The psychedelia of some of his images and scenes are drawn with higher contrast because of those abrupt juxtapositions, I think.

The impression listening to the audiobook gave me was of being surrounded by radio theater.  I found the book dark and I felt unable to escape from its darkness and perhaps unwelcomely influenced by the "tough guy/street tough" character of Case.

This book was published in 1984 and it has a cinematic quality that reminds me of Bladerunner and Black Rain; in fact, parts of the beginning of the novel are set in a future Japan, a place where black market transplants, surgically implanted prostheses and plastic surgery are commonplace.

His protagonist, Case, is a "cowboy" (data thief, or in today's parlance, a hacker) and a drug addict with a strong self-destructive impulse.  Just when he's scraped bottom, he's rescued by a mysterious man named Armitage who is accompanied by a Yakuza enforcer named Molly who has mirror shades for eyes and steel fingers that extrude from underneath her fingernails like Wolverine.

Armitage's goals are mysterious and he takes Case to a variety of settings:  the "Sprawl," a megalopolis that extends from New York to Atlanta; Istanbul; Japan again and other places I can't remember.  Case's whole world is a port city full of strangers from faraway places thrown together.

I read this book in part because I wanted to try to understand the genre of "cyberpunk," which this novel is said to have begun; while Case is clearly a hacker and his life is influenced by living in a world, both in cyberspace (a term said to have been coined by Gibson) and in the real world of foreigners shorn of nationality, there are elements of fantasy and metaphysics that seem out of place in a world in which technology has given both freedom and rootlessness.

The audiobook contained both an introduction by the author and an afterword by an author, unknown to me, who described himself as a friend of Gibson's as well as a fellow Virginian, and who argued that the novel is suffused with a sense of an Appalachian past.  I'm not quite able to see all of his point but I have to agree that there is something about the novel, that I can't quite put my finger on, that points to the past as well as the present.

There's a interesting and brief discussion of the impact that Neuromancer had when published and its relation to the development of the Internet at schmoop:  http://www.shmoop.com/neuromancer.

I realized what Neuromancer reminds me of, finally - The Maltese Falcon.  The novel opens in a bar in Japan, I think in Chiba City (I don't really remember).  The bartender is a Russian who makes little observations about Case who's a has-been addict but manages to cushion the barb with his obscure metaphors.  (I like Quentin Tarantino to direct.)

Dream a Little Dream by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

In this romance by a well-known romance writer, there are a bunch of people who are in trouble.  By the end of the novel, they're not in trouble anymore.

Rachel's husband left her when he faced legal trouble; overnight, her world collapsed and she was left with nothing.  Once looked up to in her community, she's now despised.  Her sudden change in fortune has changed her personality; as her finances become more desperate, so does she.

When her car breaks down outside a tumble-down drive-in movie on the edge of town, she meets the irksome owner who insults her little boy.  Bowed but unbeaten, she asks the guy for a job, and to sweeten the deal, makes an outrageous offer.

Despite this unpromising beginning, she gets the job and finds that helping the ornery owner fix up his tumbledown drive-in movie parking lot surprisingly fulfilling.

Last to Die by Tess Gerritsen

I really enjoyed this book and I was surprised that I did.

I had the impression that this book would have a lot of "action," which it did, but I found that I really enjoyed it anyway.

Characterization was not very deep, but the main plot of the book turned on some orphaned children.  I wouldn't have guessed it, but I enjoyed the characters of the children.

Part of the story was the relationship between Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Dr. Maura Isles, and that was a smaller part of the story than I anticipated.

I'd love to talk to someone who's read some of the other books in the series and could tell me if that's typical.  Of course, one of the problems with reading a book in a series out of order is that the "backstory" will not (or should not) be repeated for you as a newcomer.  For myself, although I'm curious about the backstory, I probably will never have time to read the other books in the series.

However, if I find a paperback from this series floating around in a drugstore or a used book sale, I'll grab it.

An enjoyable discovery.

A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton

I'd long looked forward to reading some Sue Grafton.

I was a little disappointed, and I think that's probably for a number of reasons.

The novelty of a female detective is no longer so great.  Some of the plot points were lacking in originality, as were some of the characterizations.

Some elements I did admire.  When Kinsey Millhone, the detective, goes to interview the murder victim's first wife, they have a conversation in which the first wife really springs off the page:  her portrait and dialogue seem realistic.

However, the first book in a series is often not as fully developed as later installments; I've often wondered if it isn't smarter to select a book from later in the series when I'm reading a new detective for the first time.

The Firm by John Grisham

The Firm is one of many John Grisham books that has been made into a film; while I read it, I often thought of the film but I did not feel that having seen the film kept me from enjoying the book fully.

I once started a Grisham book, years ago, and disliked it intensely.  At a time when I rarely gave up on books, I quickly stopped reading it and not only never picked it up again but never felt any desire to read another Grisham book.

However, I did enjoy this book.  I thought some of the ideas he presented were novel.  

I value his power as a descriptive writer.  Even though I was prejudiced against him as a writer when I started the novel, I found myself feeling that I could imagine what the firm's building looked like, on the basis of his description, and even what downtown Memphis looked like.  I thought that I could see the poolside at the Quins' house and the restaurants that Abby and Mitch visited.  

And I found this book exciting.  I did find it thrilling.  Of course, having seen the film, I knew something about the outcome.  But the film's plot was quite streamlined compared to that of the book, and it would have been quite easy for me to feel impatient with the drawing out of the discoveries that Mitch makes, and the actions that he undertakes.  

Reflecting on the book, I realize that I find some plot twists improbable.  I find some other things curious.  An FBI agent is preparing an indictment (do FBI agents do that?) and it's a preliminary indictment because the investigation is not complete.  Among the charges he lists, he "throws" in mail fraud because, he reasons, mail fraud is almost always a charge.  I assumed that this was a jab since Grisham has worked as a criminal defense attorney, and I'd guess that extra charges, no matter how trivial they are, just make extra work for defense attorneys.

Grisham's strength is his descriptive ability but I find his perception to be superficial.  He's excellent in describing what people look like and how the details of their appearance and mannerisms denote their class identity.  I found the attitude of the omniscient narrator calculating and cold, and a shrewd observer.  Perhaps shrewdness, while useful and possibly hard-won, is just not that attractive a quality.

The Reason Why by Vickie Stringer

Vickie Stringer is the author of a very popular fiction book, Let That Be the Reason.  Imagine This was the sequel to Let That Be the Reason, and The Reason Why is the "prequel" to Let That Be the Reason.  The Reason Why is the only one of these three books I've read; it was deeply discounted at Borders one day and I bought it.  As with so many books I read, it's just serendipity.

The Reason Why is most concisely described as a cross between Romeo and Juliet and The Sopranos.  Neither of the young lovers die in this book, but they have a sweet "first romance" that is thwarted by the by imprisonment of Chino, the head of a drug dealing street unit.

Chino meets Pam almost accidentally; to avoid a police dragnet he drops his pistol into her purse knowing that the police won't search the ladies.  Pam, a student at a Columbus, Ohio university, finds Chino to return the gun, and an instant attraction between them, full of braggadocio, flares.

To me, the charm of this book is its dialogue and the story of young lovers. When Chino is meeting with his subordinates, their dialogue is very musical.  The first time they each say "I love you" is a major moment in their romance, as is the first time Chino takes Pam to the condo he bought for them to live in.

When Chino first meets Pam, he spends a lot of time bragging about nothing in particular.  Pam is impressed, and has no thought that getting involved with Chino might not be wise or have consequences she would find heavy to bear.

Chino is making a lot of money, and sets Pam up in business.  For several chapters, their relationship deepens.  Chino plans to make a lot of money and get out of the drug dealing business.

When Chino's business is disrupted by a major bust in another area and rivalry with an adjoining gang, he is sent to prison.  While in prison he learns from a friend that Pam has been seen in public with another man.  Unable to believe that she is not cheating on him, their relationship deteriorates.