Someone’s Read it Already

Subterranean Press, purveyors of such novels as this one, this one, and this one, made an announcement last week that Lewis Shiner’s new novel, Black and White, was to start shipping last weekend, so I thought a Monday review would be good timing. The Subterranean Press edition is the only edition of this book, as far as I know. I’ve talked about the lovely book-objects that Sub Press produces so often that I won’t say any more here. I will mention that they auction books on eBay as seller ’subpress’ quite often, and sometimes at bargain rates. Check them out!

Michael Cooper’s father Robert is dying, and he has asked to return to Durham, where Robert lived when he and Ruth (Michael’s mother) first married. There have been some questions that have plagued Michael for years, such as why do he and his mother get along so badly, and why has he never seen a copy of his birth certificate? Being back in Durham, where Michael was born, he starts looking for answers — and finds a whole lot more than he bargained for. Vodou, history, race relations, highway construction, and comics all combine to make the answers not quite what Michael was expecting. (more…)

The final book in Old Favorites Week is by Madeleine L’Engle, and most readers would expect this to be a review of A Wrinkle in Time. As much as I loved that book, though, A Ring of Endless Light is the book that had more of an impact on me. I originally wrote this review when Ms. L’Engle died (September of 2007), and here it is, again, for your reading pleasure.

Technically this is the third book in the Austin family series (of which there are four, with a tangentially related fifth book), but I believe it can be read on its own. Vicky Austin is fifteen the summer that her grandfather is dying from cancer, and the whole family goes to stay with him on the island where he lives. Her older brother, John, has a summer job on the other side of the island, working with dolphins. One of his coworkers is a young man named Adam Eddington, also an aspiring marine biologist. An old acquaintance of Vicky’s (from the previous book, The Moon by Night), Zachary Gray, also makes an appearance. (more…)

This, Hale’s only book in the adult market, is a short but lovely homage to Jane Austen. The dedication is one of the funniest I’ve ever seen:

For Colin Firth
You’re a really great guy, but I’m married, so I think we should just be friends.

To digress a moment, the cover is fantastic as well. The front features a young woman, dressed in contemporary clothing, facing away from the camera. She is staring at an imposing English country house, in a post-Elizabethan style (the house, when viewed from above, forms an “E”, but the decorations are a little more Georgian). The back of the cover features the same house, but at the top, turned upside down.

The novel itself is concerned with Jane Hayes, an early thirty-something New Yorker who has rotten luck with men. When she’s down, she watches the BBC Pride and Prejudice with the aforementioned Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. At one point, in between men, she happens to talk to an elderly great-aunt of hers, and admits the Pride and Prejudice fascination. When that great-aunt dies, Jane inherits an all-expenses-paid trip to a place called Austenland — an English country house run as an odd sort of tourist site. The tourists are wealthy women who stay for a few weeks, pretending to be in the Regency era, complete with clothing and lack of contemporary things, including cell phones, cars, and take-out.

Jane goes, of course, but not everything is quite what it seems. (more…)