Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin

This novel is the first in the Inspector Rebus series, by Ian Rankin. I saw Ian Rankin interviewed on a book talk show. Rankin said that he enjoyed using crime fiction to talk about social issues. That made me want to read his work. He's also a bestselling author.

In Knots and Crosses, Rebus is part of a task force working on the murders of two girls. The investigation is not going well; the police believe that there must be some common link between the girls, some way that they are coming into contact with the serial killer. But despite hundreds of hours of interviews of neighbors and people who knew the girls, they can't discover the how the killer is picking his victims.

Rebus is having a tough time in his life; he's divorced from his wife and his daughter, now 12, is living with his ex-wife and he when he does spend time with his daughter he finds it hard to connect with her. The police are stymied; they continue to interview neighbors and people who knew the victims but they can't discover the how the killer is picking his victims.

Rebus is having a tough time in his life; he's divorced from his wife and his daughter, now 12, is living with his ex-wife and he finds it hard to connect with her.


His father has recently died, and he's not close to his brother, Michael, a stage hypnotist. He barely knows Michael as an adult; when he drops in without calling to visit his brother,

He's ex-Army, but he never talks about his Army years. His career in the police has not been easy; the Army got him his job and the other cops know this and resent this.

He doesn't want to be assigned to the task force, partly because he has other cases on his plate, but also because he understands that he's likely to be assigned to go door-to-door to interview neighbors, looking for any kind of clue, and that's he likely to be assigned to review old case files on individuals who have been suspected on crimes in the past. Sure enough, he's assigned to file review duty and just hates it.

Rebus is trying to form a new relationship with a colleague, Gill, someone he knows from work but connects with at a party.

This mix of loneliness, frustration, and stasis mark the first half of the novel. In the second half of the novel, the action picks up quickly and becomes very exciting. The trauma that Rebus suffers from the Army is explained, and as the action resolves it's easy to see the point that Rankin wanted to make.

The "missing connection" the police finally discover is rather moving, in its way. Surprisingly, I found this novel cheering and impressive. Rebus often ruminates on the history of crime in Edinburgh (and notes with contempt the tourists photographing the statue of Greyfriars Bobby). Edinburgh is a city known for the flowering of the Englightenment that took place there in the 18th century (so amazing in that even today, Edinburgh has only 500,000 people living there, and Scotland's status as an independent nation had been under attack since James VI became James I, and certainly by the time of the Act of Union in 1707); in a way, I see this novel as an assertion of the value of those ideals.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

"Ships at a distance have every man's wishes on board." That's the wonderful first sentence of  Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. LOVED this book. It moved me when I didn't expect it to. I cried at the end. I wasn't expecting that I would feel so emotional about it, but I did. It's a psychologically acute novel that has a very uplifting ending. I think I was a little surprised to discover that this novel is about romantic love and its importance in the life of protagonist.

It did remind me of The Color Purple, which I read years ago, before the movie was made - and which I also loved, and which I also found uplifting.

One difficulty that I had reading the book is that there is a lot of regional dialect and slang. The dialogue is rendered phonetically and I found that I sometimes had to sound it out to understand exactly what the characters were saying. I found that I did want to know exactly what the characters were saying. There were a few times that I ran across words that I did not recognize and did not understand the meaning of simply from context, but it didn't prevent me from making a good guess based on the context. I understand that some readers would find this very challenging. I think that curiosity drove me, and the instinctive sense of identification I felt with Janie, the protagonist.

I've always wondered what the meaning of the phrase, "Their Eyes Were Watching God," was. I found out when I read the book, of course. Late in the book, the characters are caught in a hurricane - a bad one, like Hurricane Florence. As the people who've chosen to remain behind hear the wind howl they begin to understand how cataclysmic the storm is that's coming. They're waiting to see just how bad it is going to be, and they're terrified: their eyes were watching God.

Janie and Tea Cake are attempting to wait out the storm in their home:

    "The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time.
     They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining
     against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their
     puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark,
     but their eyes were watching God."

The description of the hurricane feels very realistic, and it reminded me of the news reports we've heard lately about hurricanes striking the U.S. coast. In fact, Hurston's account was inspired by the 1928 Lake Okeechobee hurricane, which you can read about it on Wikipedia if you're interested.

Their Eyes is an affirming novel. Janie is raised by her grandmother, a former slave. When, at 16, Janie becomes interested in boys, her grandmother is afraid for her. In response, her grandmother, Nanny, marries Janie off to an older farmer. To Janie's grandmother, formal marriage to a land-owning farmer who can offer Janie financial security is the best way to protect Janie. Janie, on the other hand, is unhappy. She has ideas about love her farmer husband does not fulfill.

She meets a man, Jody, who has money and is ready to buy property and settle down. He wants Janie to run away with him. She is impressed by his self-confidence and leaves her husband. Her husband's parting words to her are an admonition that her life with him was safe and she'll regret abandoning the security he provided her.

Her marriage to Jody lasts twenty years. She soon finds that Jody is proud of his position in town (he becomes a property owner and mayor) and Jody insists that Janie cover her hair, and not participate in the conversation and gossip that takes place on the porch of Jody's store, where Janie works. Janie sees that Jody has very fixed ideas about how she should behave, and she finds them constricting. To her, Jody's ideas about his social status and her behavior prevent her from feeling loved or free.

Towards the end of their marriage, Jody and Janie have a fight in which she laughs at him. This is so hurtful to Jody that he withdraws from her. He sickens and dies, while trying to exclude Janie from his care.

When Janie attends Jody's funeral, she's honest with herself about the fact that she did not love her husband and certainly did not feel loved by him but puts on the social face that her community expects of her.

After her husband's death, she is wealthy and independent, having inherited her husband's property. Many men come courting her, telling her how sad it is for a woman to be alone and how necessary it is for a widow to remarry. Janie's not interested in any of this men. One day a man called Tea Cake visits her at the store. He begins to court her. He is younger than she is, and she finds his interest in her intriguing although she tries to talk herself out of having feelings for him. The neighbors are alarmed. Her best friend, Pheoby, tells her a cautionary tale about another widow who was exploited for her money and abandoned when her love had spent it all. Janie feels apprehensive about Tea Cake.

Tea Cake is a laborer and a gambler who takes Janie fishing and to social events. Janie begins to fall in love with him. Eventually, they go together to the Everglades, where they are the social center of a seasonal community of migrant workers. Janie sometimes takes care of the house, and sometimes works in the fields with Tea Cake. Janie feels that Tea Cake really loves her, and that this relationship is the one that she dreamed of as a girl.

After two years, a hurricane hits their community. As their home is flooded, they flee. A gust of wind blows Janie off the dyke they are traveling along and into the rising, swift-moving water as they try to get to Palm Beach. Tea Cake manages to save her but is bit by a rabid dog in the process. They reach Palm Beach and the storm ends. They think that they are safe but Tea Cake is dying. As he sickens, he becomes volatile and violent. Finally, Janie is forced to shoot him in a violent confrontation.

Janie believes she was really happy with Tea Cake. When Janie and Tea Cake are trapped in the hurricane, Tea Cake turns to Janie and asks her if she regrets staying with him when many of their neighbors left in advance of the storm. She replies:

       Naw. We been tuhgether for round two years. If you kin see de light
       at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk.  It's so many people
       never seen de light at all.  Ah wuz fumblin' round and God opened the door."

She mourns Tea Cake but is comforted by knowing that they really loved each other. Tea Cake has made her feel deeply satisfied, and she feels validated, in a way that she never had in her two marriages. She returns to the town where she lived with Jody, and tells Pheoby the whole story.

Janie tells Pheoby:

     "Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes
     its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore." 

In her bedroom that night, Janie thinks about Tea Cake:

     "The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the courthouse came
     and commenced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner in the room;
     out of each and every chair and thing.  Commenced to sing,
     commenced to sob and sigh, singing and sobbing. Then Tea Cake came
     prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh
     flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine trees,
     Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl.  Of course he wasn't dead.
     He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking.
     The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall.
     Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a fish-net. Pulled it from
     around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder.
     So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul
     to come and see."

The Great American Read PBS show recently finished; it was seeing Their Eyes Were Watching God that reminded I've been meaning for a long while to read this book, and inspired me to finally undertake this work. At the end, the results of a months-long voting for the most popular novel was revealed. Their Eyes Were Watching God came in at #51. I wonder if it would have even been that high on the list had Dr. Gates not encouraged viewed to read this book. I can think of tons of reasons why it's not higher on the list, but I can of one really great reason for it to be on the list: I'm nothing like Janie Crawford. I think I loved this book because, perhaps because Jody takes Janie to live in a community that is entirely African-American, or perhaps for some other reason, Hurston seems to me convey an appreciation for community that is reflected in her storytelling. Perhaps it's also reflected in the Janie's wish to socialize on the front porch, and in the "sass" she has to share with her neighbors and her husband. She's telling a woman-centered story. Janie's  journey to self-actualization moved me greatly and gave me joy.

Note: The 2000 edition of this novel that I checked out from the library has a forward by Edwidge Danticat, the Haitian-American novelist, and a note on publication history by Richard Wentworth, a former director of the University of Illinois Press.

Danticat details her personal history with the novel: Danticat attended Barnard College, where she studied the novel for the second time, and which Hurston herself had attended. Danticat notes with pride that Hurston wrote the novel while in Haiti, and somehow found time for it amid her work as an anthropologist. Danticat points out that one of the strengths of the novel is its communal quality. I sense this, without being able to point out exactly how this is so (perhaps in part because the town Jody brings her to live in is an all African-American community). Danticat reports that students in her class debated whether Their Eyes should be regarded as a story of adventure, and I agree that it should My very favorite part of Danticat's account of her own personal relationship with the novel is that she reports that she first read the novel in high school, in an elective black history class at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, in a class taught by a teacher during his lunch hour. It reminds me of how moved I was when I bought a compilation of Anita O'Day's albums issued by a couple in Bristol using their garage as as their office. I think a lot of people think that culture is for other people. To me, it's for all of us and the work that we do to preserve and celebrate culture may go unnoticed but is heroic and important.

In the "Note on publication history," Wentworth writes: "The story of how the University of Illinois Press became the publisher of Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the most interesting publishing stories of recent decades. In the 1970s, the University of Illinois Press published the African-American poet Michael S. Harper, who passed the word that a friend of his named Robert E. Hemenway was working on a major biography of a neglected African-American writer, Zora Neale Hurston. Professor Hemenway's book was indeed major and compelling, so the University of Illinois signed him up and published Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography in 1977. Professor Hemenway also advised his editor that it would be a good idea to acquire the rights, if possible, to Hurston's most important book, Their Eyes Were Watching God." The Press did acquire the rights, and published Their Eyes, and in ten years sold 350,000 copies, a big success for an academic press. Wentworth goes on to explain that the foundation for this success was Hurston's rediscovery by African-American writers in the '60s and '70s and especially by Alice Walker who wrote an important essay about Hurston's work for Ms. Magazine, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston." A petition to reissue the book was also circulated at the Modern Language Association  Convention in 1975. I want to share this story because it makes me feel hopeful, and because it shows the important role that cultural institutions have in our shared life.

A friend suggested that I read "Looking for Zora," Alice Walker's 1975 essay (published in Ms. Magazine) about visiting Zora Neale Hurston's home town. If you have any interest in this novel or its author, I recommend you read it: it's available as a .pdf Google document on the internet. It's a great essay: it's a road trip story, very entertainingly told. For me, it explains so much about Their Eyes Were Watching God. I see that Janie's community was based on large part on the all-African-American town that Hurston grew up in, and that Janie's husband was based on the real-life mayor, and that Janie herself was likely based on part on a woman Hurston knew and who Alice talks to on her trip. This essay was instrumental in reigniting interest in Hurston's life and work.

The edition I read has a introduction by Edwidge Danticat, and in her introduction, Danticat mentions that some are skeptical about Hurston's claim that she wrote Their Eyes in six weeks while visiting Haiti. Gosh, I do not feel skeptical about that claim. It seems to me that Their Eyes tells the story of the people Hurston grew up with and is a kind of literary foundation myth. I imagine that being in a country like Haiti, where everyone is descended from the African disapora would have reminded Hurston of her own home town. With that inspiration, I think it might have been very easy to think up the story and fill it with fictional portraits. 

Favorite romance movies

I love lists, and I also love the idea of having a handy list of things to consider for a rainy afternoon or to recommend to others. So I thought I'd put together a list of favorite romance movies. It's heavy on period drama but in other ways is kind of eclectic.

1. definitely, maybe

Great cast: Ryan Reynolds, Abigail Breslin, Rachel Weisz, Elizabeth Banks, and Isla Fisher. Derek Luke plays the roommate. To me, this is a "grown-up" romance, one that acknowledges grown-up issues like job loss and divorce, and most of all, offers a touching love story in the relationship between the protagonist and his 10-year-old daughter. That's the center of the film and its most satisfying component (besides the fact that the daughter has the most wonderful bedroom ever, with white Christmas lights wrapped around her bed). This film had me at "hello": the titles sequence begins with Sly and the Family Stone's "I Love Everyday People".

2. True Romance

Despite its title, a film with quite a bit of violence and some grit. Patricia Arquette and Christian Slater are the lovers on the run. Most memorable is James Gandolfini's breakout performance as a gay hitman who's a good listener.

3. Pride and Prejudice

1995 edition. Because: Colin Firth. That's a bit of a glib remark and while entertaining, and true, not quite sufficient. There's many reasons to like this adaptation. One, I think, is because the novel is served far better here in a longer adaptation meant to convey the sexiness that the reader understands. The performances are fantastic: Firth and Ehle, but also Alison Steadman, Ben Whitrow, David Bamber and many others. It was so fun to see Lucy Briers (Mary) again in Parade's End. Some have criticized Steadman's performance for being too broad but I feel that it underscores the humor that may not always be obvious to readers and viewers that are new to Austen. This film contains my favorite Austen quote, here in the mouth of Mr. Austen: “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”

I think that sums up the humor of Pride and Prejudice, and how a domestic drama about a few families in a village can contain worlds of psychological truth and humor.

4. North and South

If you loved Pride and Prejudice, you will also love North & South, adapted from Mrs. Gaskell's novel, with Richard Armitage and Daniela Denby-Ashe, which has many similarities in the unfolding of its love story. Sinead Cusack gives an outstanding performance as Richard Armitage's mother; her unwavering firmness feels real and gives the love story some ballast.

5. Persuasion

Also 1995. Persuasion is my favorite Austen novel, with its promise of second chances. Another wonderful cast, directed by Roger Michell: Amanda Root, and Ciaran Hinds, in the leads, along with Sophie Thompson, Susan Fleetwood, Corin Redgrave, Fiona Shaw, Samuel West, John Woodvine, Robert Glenister, Richard McCabe, Phoebe Nichols, Simon Russell Beale. I loved Susan Fleetwood as Lady Russell, and Sophie Thompson's Mary was a revelation: she's the best Mary I've seen. Samuel West was the perfect Mr. Eliot. I understand that Austen rewrote her first draft of this novel and greatly lengthened the ending, including Captain Wentworth's climactic letter: 

You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you.

It's impossible to imagine the novel without this letter. (I recently read that after Austen had completed the novel, she picked it up again, revised it completely, and gave it this new ending.) Good grief! The movie's worth watching for this alone.

It was filmed in Bath, a beautiful city filled with Georgian architecture, another reason to watch.

6. Vintage films:

It Happened One Night
My Man Godfrey
The Little Shop Around the Corner
Ball of Fire
The Lady Eve

White Houses by Amy Bloom

A few years ago, when Amy Bloom's last novel, Lucky Us, came out, I read an interview with Bloom in which she said that her children said about her work: "It's always about sex and death." I thought that sounded intriguing.

So when my book group chose White Houses to read, I looked forward to it. 

White Houses is historical fiction, about the relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and her lover, the newspaper reporter Lorena Hickok.

I didn't like the beginning. The scene in the opening chapter takes place just after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, and Eleanor and Lorena meet again after having been apart for some years. This scene emphasized the class difference between Eleanor and Lorena: Eleanor enters the apartment and sheds her clothes as she walks through it; Lorena follows, picking up Eleanor's clothes off the floor and hanging them up.

But I found as I read on that this novel was a compelling read. There's a tremendous amount written about the life of Eleanor Roosevelt, and Bloom seems to have read it all. It's clear she did a great deal of research. The narrative is full of observations about Eleanor's life, the many people she knew, and the many things she did.

We also learn about Lorena's hardscrabble rural background. This interest in the Depression and the period before it reminds me that Lucky Us was set during the depression (and partly in Hollywood).  

There's an interesting contrast, to me, between Lorena's deeply practical nature and the richness of Bloom's language. Bloom is a wonderful writer, and her prose just pulled me along.

Hereditary

I enjoyed seeing Get Out so much last year that I decided I'd take a chance and go see Hereditary. I really enjoyed it. I thought Toni Collette and Gabriel Byrne's acting was very good, and that quality of verisimilitude made the story much more scary. But, it's not too scary. In my view, just the right amount. I'd definitely recommend it.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I skimmed this book last night. It's one of many on the list for the Great American Read, and one of many on that list that appeal to teens and young adults, and are suitable for parents and teens to read together.

I skimmed it because I read the first five pages or so and realized that I quite disliked the idea that the narrator of the book is a supernatural figure that invisibly gathers souls. It reminded me a little bit of The Lovely Bones, which was enormously popular at the time that I read it. This novel has been a bestseller for a very long time.

And, in fact, the framework of the narrator who sees things from above, led me, as I was reading, to see the book in very cinematic terms. In fact, as I skimmed the book there were many times that the mental pictures formed in my mind were similar to crane shots. I know that this novel was made into a movie a few years ago, and I think I'd be interested in watching the movie to see how the filmmaker's mental pictures compared with my own.

This book has been loved by many, but I imagine will not appeal to everyone. As a work of imagination, I admire Zusak's novel very greatly. I also admire that the Hubermanns were both ordinary and heroic; their story was lost as many stories have been lost. Zusak gives that lost history a record.

The Great American Read by PBS

PBS is showing an eight-part series, hosted by journalist Meredith Vieira, that be shown from May to October. The objective of the series is to get folks to read. A list of 100 books is available at the series' website. Viewers will be encouraged to read titles they haven't read before, and to vote for their favorite book.

The list was created by allowing 7200 folks to vote. I've just looked at the list of 100 titles, and I see that I've read 40 of the titles on the list. There are many YA titles, like the Hunger Games and Twilight, which I've never read. I did not include Harry Potter on my list, as I've only read the first book.

As I was going through the list, I realized that I would often come to a title, and look at it rather stupidly before remembering that I had read it and should include it on my list.

At least seven of the titles were titles that I'd read for school; many more I'd read just because I wanted to. And I had read two classic YA titles, C.S. Lewis Narnia books and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. My recollection is that I'd just scarfed these books up. I remember reading Gulliver's Travels as a child and then again in our Augustan Age class; of course, I understood it much better as an adult but recognized, somehow, that I felt at sea and wondered what it was that I was missing.

The list does seem to me to be heavy in YA favorites: The Giver by Lois Lowry, Looking for Alaska by John Green, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

Here's the entire list: http://www.pbs.org/the-great-american-read/books/#/. See how many you've read.

I think I'm definitely going to read at least one book, and perhaps it will be Looking for Alaska or perhaps the Book Thief or Their Eyes were Watching God. Years ago I read a short story by Zora Neale Thurston and I think for that reason I've been wanting to read Their Eyes for some time.

I think this is quite an ambitious project, and I love it. I look forward to participating. If you'd like to find out more about the show, here's the show's website: http://www.pbs.org/the-great-american-read/home/. The first episode will be shown here on Tuesday night at 8 pm.

Don't forget to vote for your favorite on the list. It's possible to vote every day!

Columbine by Dave Cullen

Read this book for my book group, very reluctantly. I just have never been interested in crime stories.

My book group rated it very highly: they valued the quality of the writing, the quality of the research behind it, and the wide-ranging aspects of the reporting.

I couldn't help wanting to consider the public policy implications of what Cullen had to say about the events of that day. A mental health professional and researcher Cullen spoke came to believe that both shooters, Harris and Klebold, had undiagnosed mental health illness. Harris was a narcissistic psychopath (the shooting was originally intended to be a bombing and to demonstrated his superiority) and Klebold suffered from depression and perhaps other mental health illness. I'm grossly simplifying.

The public policy implication I inferred from the reporting in this book is that school shootings are a significant public health problem deserving of public investment. Money should be spent on research and on educating the public about the kinds of signs that troubled teenagers (and others) may display before a shooting event. Further, there is a need for school shooting reporting to be less sensationalistic (to some extent, I think the frequency of school shootings might cause that already to be happening). I recall that in The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell reported a phenomenon in a South Sea island community, in which suicide had become contagious among teenagers. I think this "contagion," this impulse for teenagers to imitate each other, is very profound. We should be aware of it and act accordingly. I think that response should include not publicizing school shooters because giving school shooters notoriety is part of the problem. Although Cullen did not address this topic, I think that there is a need for a greater institutional response, including trainings, about shootings of this kind and how public administrators and front line public service providers should respond.

Lies She Told by Cate Holahan

Lies She Told is another "twisty" tale with an unreliable narrator. For folks who found Gone Girl somewhat tiresome, if only because there was a substantial section of the book, right before the twist, that seemed a little static, this book might be a better choice. It's more simply told, it's very well-paced from the very beginning, and it's only 288 pages. I must admit that I'm a big fan of less than 300 pages.

There were certain aspects of this book that I found very engaging. It's a tale within a tale: chapters alternate between the story of Liza, a psychological suspense author who is trying to "stay in the game," and continue writing through a seeming slump in inspiration, sales, and visibility, and the Beth, the protagonist of the novel Liza is writing.

While Liza, the author, is writing her book, we see that she is suffering from anxiety that her publisher will drop her for low sales, and she is constantly anxious about continuing to write, finishing her chapters, meeting her deadlines, and negotiating her relationship with her editor - even when she is suffering from migraine headaches. She is anxious. She dreads attending a conference where she will attempt to promote her last published book, which did not sell well. This "day-in-the-life" snapshot of a midlist published author was clever and funny, and I enjoyed it. And underneath the plot, and the suffering of the characters (both the author, Liza, and her character, Beth, are married to men keeping secrets from their wives) I felt a kind of breathless exuberance.

I was surprised again that I picked up on some clues and foresaw some elements of the plot. That's not like me; I'm usually quite surprised to find out who the killer is.

Nevertheless, the closing chapters of the book are suspenseful and full of revelations that I did not see coming.

I think this book will entertain folks who love a twisty tale but found Gone Girl too long. The fast-paced narrative makes it a good choice for travel.

Lies She Told is author Holahan's third book; the first were Dark Turns (I love a book title that telegraphs the delights to be found inside) and The Widower's Wife.

Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, An American Town by Warren St. John

This nonfiction book written by a reporter from the New York Times, is part sports story, part human interest story, part sociological study.

My book group read this book, and it was chosen because the author was doing some promotion locally. It's obvious to me that promotion works: I just read a sports book!

It's also a wonderful thing to visit this book, written in 2009, about immigrants working together and about what they can contribute to a community.

In this book, of course, part of what the refugees in the story are offering are their soccer skills, honed in alleys and streets and dusty fields. But something else these refugees offer to the people who are helping them and others around them is resilience, strength, gratitude, and love of family.

In Clarkston, Georgia, refugees are resettled in inexpensive apartment complexes on the edge of town. Gradually, their numbers grow and their presence begins to change the nature of the town.

Refugees have many problems. They have to work in order to support their families, but they often speak little or no English. Refugees are lent the money for the tickets to the U.S.; they receive only three months of assistance. They've often experienced terrible trauma, witnessing acts of violence and sometimes witnessing acts of violence against members of their own family.

A Jordanian immigrant, Luma Mufleh, a graduate of Smith College, moves to Georgia because the weather reminds her of her home. She is a former soccer player and a huge fan. She starts coaching soccer because she enjoys it so much and feels inspired by her own coach as a child, an American woman married to a diplomat living in Jordan.

Eventually, she stumbles upon the immigrant community in Clarkston, and decides that she would like to coach soccer there. She recognizes that poverty and trauma place special stresses on these refugee kids, and that's part of what motivates her.

This book is the story of how she succeeding in overcoming her teams' lack of experience of team discipline, their occasional need to act out, the lack of funding for equipment, and succeeded not only in helping all her soccer players to play better soccer, to have a social and comforting experience where they can make new friends, be kept busy doing something that they love and kept out of trouble, and learn to work together as a team with people from different backgrounds, and leadership skills.

I fell in love with the book around the third page. I just felt absorbed in the stories of Luma and wanted to learn more about her and the young men she was working with in her soccer program.

My book group found the writing style here somewhat plain. I too, initially saw St. John's writing style that way. However, by the fifth page, I was completely engrossed. I was just so curious about how Luma would solve the team's problems, how she'd manage her relationship with the YMCA who subsidized the program by renting a field for the team and providing a bus, and her relationship with the young soccer players in her program.

Some of the problems that Luma encountered were that the community center where the YMCA rented a field for her really didn't want the team to practice there. Eventually, the community center ended the relationship, leaving Luma's team with no place to play. No specific reason was given, I think, but the inference I drew was that the refugee children on the team were viewed as outsiders to the community.

Since the events chronicled in the book, things have changed in Clarkston. While many residents moved away, new residents who appreciated being in a diverse community moved in. A new mayor, a younger man who embraced Clarkston's diversity, was elected.

I googled Luma and found that she is attempting to raise money for a new facility to provide soccer programs for children in Clarkston. I think that that sports facility would be an asset to the community, and I cannot help being pleased that the diversity that immigration brings is now valued in Clarkston.

The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood

This is a wonderful suspense novel. It's what I call a "twisty tale," a thriller with a wonderful twist at the end that you never see coming.

I'd been interested in reading this novel for some time, ever since I'd read Stephen King's enthusiastic assessment in one of his end-of-the-year "best of" columns he writes for Entertainment Weekly. What struck me was that he is a very skilled writer, and he obviously believed that Alex Marwood is one, too. His admiration filled me with curiosity. I couldn't help thinking, with this recommendation, this book must be great.

What I see here is a wonderfully suspenseful novel, written in a very colloquial, accessible manner, with lots of real-life details that gives it a great sense of reality and immediacy, as well as finely drawn characters. 

This is a hard novel to summarize, because the plot is intricate. Kirsty Lindsay is a stringer, a freelance journalist. Two murders have occurred in Whitmouth, a seaside resort town. When a third murder occurs, Kirsty is sent to cover the murders. The police aren't releasing much information; in her desperation to find something to write about that isn't already on the AP wire, she bribes her way into the scene of the third murder, the hall of mirrors in an amusement park. In the event, she isn't actually able to get inside, but she encounters someone shocking: someone whom she hasn't seen since she was a child, and who will change her life forever.

I think this book will appeal to fans of Gone Girl and Girl on the Train who would enjoy a twisty tale without the marriage element.

My Penguin paperback has admiring blurbs by other thriller writers on the front, the back, and in the first two pages. My favorite quote was from Elizabeth Haynes. She wrote: "I loved it. I thought it was a brilliant exploration of the sins of the past colliding with the mistakes of the present; really well-written, multi-faceted characters, who behave in ways you wouldn't expect them to: in other words, like real people."

I really felt that in addition to being well-crafted, this book was thoughtful. India Knight called it "haunting," and that's how I feel. I found myself feeling really engaged with this story, as if it were happening down the street.

Alex Marwood is the pseudonym of journalist living in London, Serena Mackesy. The Wicked Girls came out in 2012 and won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original in 2014; she has since published two other books, The Killer Next Door and The Darkest Secret.