Land of Shadows (Rachel Howzell Hall)

This is a good, solid example of a gritty police-procedural murder mystery. The protagonist is a tough homicide detective, a black woman who grew up in the Jungle, a low-income high-crime area she now polices. A new murder has elements that remind her of her own sister's murder many years before, and she becomes obsessed with not only solving this murder, but showing that the same man is responsible for both. There are some flaws, but it is a good first effort and indicates some promise for the future of the series.

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (Eimear McBride)

This is the story of a troubled girl growing up in a disturbed family, overshadowed by her brother's childhood brain surgery and her single mother's religious fixations. I admired the author's unique language, using broken sentence fragments and neologisms to convey the broken, emotionally forceful story she wanted to tell, but it didn't work for me. I was constantly focusing on the words and had difficulty pushing through them to the story itself. This probably reflects a failure on my part to appreciate the poetic rhythm of the language and how it could pull you in, stuck in my own literal thinking. but there it is. I can recommend it to anyone who is more open than I am to the abstract impressionism the author is going for here.

The Leftovers (Tom Perrotta)

At one moment, all over the world, people suddenly vanish. Cars careen driverless, dinners burn on the stove, babies stop crying between one breath and the next. Some folks immediately think it's the Rapture, but there is no rhyme or reason as to who goes and who stays: old, young, Christian, Muslim, atheist, kind, abusive. No explanation is every uncovered for the Great Departure. This book is about what happens to those who are left. Everyone is knocked off-kilter, either because of their own loved ones gone, or because of the disruption to society and to their sense of the stability of the world. A woman tries to find a life after her whole family is taken, a mother retreats from her own fully-intact family out of a sense that the world has lost something that can't be regained, a boy leaves college to follow a charismatic guru. These characters are real and their pain, and their heroism, call out to all of us. Tender and wrenching, this book draws you in and won't let go.

Raising Stony Mayhall (Daryl Gregory)

Once again, Gregory takes broken, dangerous people and turns them into complex, intriguing, and sympathetic heroes. Stony Mayhall is a zombie, but a very unusual zombie. Found as a newly-undead newborn and taken in by a solid apple-pie Iowa family, Stony manages to do the impossible over and over again, and we are rooting for him all the way. This is a story of family, of love, of trying to do the right thing in the most difficult of situations. We know from the opening chapter, which sets a frame to which the rest of the story is flashback, that key people will survive, but how remains unclear until the very end. I have nothing but admiration for Gregory's storytelling.

The Memory Garden (Mary Rickert)

As a pretty old woman myself, I appreciated a novel in which one of the main characters is an even older woman, portrayed with unsentimental honesty but also love and respect. Nan has sore bones and faulty memories, but she is loyal and as good as she know hows to be. The other main character is her adolescent adopted daughter, a foundling left on her doorstep, born under a caul that gives her powers she doesn't know about. The main action takes place in a few days, as estranged friends from Nan's past come to visit, but this visit is just the stage on which old memories play out their flawed, contradictory, and ultimately redeeming story. As we wind backward and forward in time characters cross the boundary between life and death over and over, to the point where at the end it's not clear which side of this line each is on. This book reminds us that memories, as unreliable and fickle as they are, make us who we are. Highly recommended for its quiet, simple, but profound story telling and the lush descriptions of gardens, food, and experiences in general.

My Real Children (Jo Walton)

Patricia, the protagonist in this story, leads two different lives. One day a man tells her she must decide at that moment whether to marry him, now or never. She chooses now, and goes into a marriage filled with strife. She chooses never and goes into life unmarried, and into a very different relationship. Both of these lives play out side by side, in different worlds with histories that diverge from that point not just personally but globally. The stories of the two lives were interesting, but with a certain narrative distance that kept me from becoming as engaged as I would have liked. I stayed with it to the end partly to find out what happened to the two different Patricias and partly to find out why she was living in this strange, mirrored way. While I did find out what happened to her, I never did find out why, and this left me feeling unsatisfied. So while I can recommend it for the loveliness of the characterizations, I can't recommend it for those who, like me, want a little more closure in their stories.

The Devil's Alphabet (Daryl Gregory)

This is not my favorite of Gregory's books (that I've read so far, anyway), but still really good. Years ago the residents of a small town in Tennessee suddenly started to change - some became huge, tall and strong, some grotesquely fat, some red-skinned and hairless (and spontaneously pregnant, always with girls). Many died in the transition. A few were skipped over, not changing at all, including the narrator who escaped to Chicago after the quarantine was lifted. Now he's come back to town for the funeral of a dear friend and is drawn back into mysteries within mysteries, relating to drugs, violence, death, and the true nature of this metamorphosis. I loved his other books for their view from inside madness; the narrator here is rather tamely sane, so I never felt drawn into the wonder of the story quite so much. Gregory does explore the nature of family, including the narrator's strained relationship with his father and how family and children shape our view of the world.

Swamplandia! (Karen Russell)

Swamplandia! is a Florida tourist attraction featuring alligator wrestling and a family steeped in its own mythical history, fallen on hard times after the mother of the family dies and a slick tourist attraction on the mainland draws away all the customers. One by one the family members leave the island, each trying in some individual fashion to find a new future for them all. The author paints both the human drama of the family and the overwhelming, lazy explosion of life in the swamp with heartbreaking clarity. At times the story wanders a little far into the mists of unreality for my taste, and there was a certain distance from the experiences of the characters, even in the parts of the story told in first person from inside the experience of young Ava Bigtree. Still, I never stopped wanting to know what came next.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Rachel Joyce)

This is a charming, gentle, life-affirming book, though there is a lot of dark material there.  Harold and Maureen are living in a cold, empty marriage in a cold, empty house, when Harold gets a letter saying that an old friend is facing death on the other side of England, and it shakes him. He heads out to mail her a letter of sympathy, but simply keeps walking, heading north to be with her in her last days. His walk takes on mythic dimensions, and helps him and Maureen work separately on the issues that keep them apart. The big reveal toward the end is not actually much of a surprise, but it all fits together. I found it moving and engaging, and felt that I got to know the characters well.

The Other Wes Moore (Wes Moore)

This is a memoir and a biography, telling the stories of two men named Wes Moore.  Both were black, both lived in the same neighborhood in Baltimore at the same time, both grew up in single-mother households, both had scrapes with the law at an early age, both struggled in school. Their lives diverged wildly, though; the Wes Moore who authored this book became a military man, a Rhodes Scholar, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, a happily married man, and a nationally-known speaker, while the other Wes Moore will live out his life in prison for murder. What happened? How did the author's life get turned around and set back on track, while the other kept spiraling further and further down a dark path? The book offers many possibilities: one father abandoned his boy while the other died unexpectedly, one mother was never able to complete college while the other was a college graduate, one dropped out of failing inner-city schools while the other was able to attend private and military schools. Ultimately, though, there are no clear answers. This book is a thoughtful look at the questions, opening our eyes to the complexity of the situation and the difficulty of finding the answers. Highly recommended.

The Interestings (Meg Wolitzer)

In this story we follow the lives of six young people who bonded together in a summer art camp in 1975 and who called themselves, with pretentious teen irony, The Interestings. As they progress to adulthood and middle age we see them grow and change in unexpected ways. Each of the characters is clearly drawn and engaging, and I was always eager to know what happened next in their very different lives. The events that happened to them and their reactions to them were not always entirely believable, but I was willing to suspend disbelief to stay with the story. In the end, it's not clear what point the author was making in this story, beyond "Look at these people - aren't they interesting?" Each moment was well done, but I wanted them to add up to more of a story and less of a picture of a life, or rather several lives. All that aside, though, it was good and I'm very glad to have read it.

Family Matters (Rohinton Mistry)

This is a close-up, unflinching portrait of a family in present-day Bombay struggling with many issues. The central character for most of the book is the family patriarch, living with his two adult stepchildren, who seem to be too bitter and focused on complaining about life to have ever married. He has Parkinson's and, on one of his daily walks, is injured, putting an intolerable burden of nursing and care on these two. Across town his biological daughter is living with her husband and two children in a two-room apartment, and his relationship with them is loving and tender. How will this family deal with the patriarch's escalating needs for care when money, space, and patience are stretched thin? Mistry paints unforgettable pictures of all the people, from the patriarch to the laborers hired to haul heavy things, and the epic city of Bombay itself. My personal preference is for stories with more likeable characters; as this story goes on, there are fewer and fewer of those to curl up with. The last section of the book, which I originally took for a small epilogue but spanned at least a chapter, seemed almost to come from a different story entirely - the main character had changed in ways that did not feel entirely justified. These are the only weaknesses in an otherwise fine novel.

After Visiting Friends (Michael Hainey)

In this memoir, the author describes his search for the truth about his father, who died when he was only six. Although the people and events are drawn clearly, there seemed to be missed opportunities to bring the story to life. Pages and pages were devoted to detailing the interviews with people who had little to add to the story, but there was not enough about two core people: the author and his mother. We see both of them from the outside, from a distance, and never get to know either of them well. Though the author describes how the loss of his father colored his childhood, there was nothing much about his current life; he mentions a girlfriend in passing, but we are never told about this relationship or about anything in his professional life aside from pursuing the investigation. This made the story seem distant and passionless.

Hikikomori and the Rental Sister (Jeff Backhaus)

In Japan, it is something of an epidemic that young men who feel too much pressure become hikikomori, withdrawing from the world, and rental sisters are employed to coax them out again - here the concept is applied to a man closer to middle age who withdraws after a family tragedy. After trying for three years to get her traumatized husband to emerge from his room, his wife engages a young Japanese woman as his rental sister. The story was engaging enough, but ultimately not really satisfying. It seemed that there was too much sex involved; it distracted from the actual inner lives of the people involved. It seems to be the view of the male author that a sister couldn't accomplish what a lover could. I don't agree.

The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt)

Aside from being perhaps 20% longer than it should have been, this is a remarkable book. Theo grows up from an anxious but happy boy through tragedy,neglect, and disturbance to a broken, wounded, but still coping man. He was drawn with dead-on accuracy at each stage of his scattered life, and I cared about him a lot. Other characters were less clearly drawn or less plausible, and some of the changes he went through were not as thoroughly justified as I would have liked, but on the whole it was engrossing and touching. I am unsurprised to learn that it won the Pulitzer.

A Reliable Wife ((Robert Goolrick)

Ralph Truitt, the stern, upright titan of business in a small town in Wisconsin in 1907, long widowed, placed a newspaper ad seeking a "reliable wife." Catherine Land, who answered the ad, is not who she seems to be. We follow the two of them, their lives, past and present, and their deepening relationship, built on lies and lust. There is a whole lot of lust in this book; most of the characters seem driven by unslakable desires. The author explores in some detail life in the darkest, most depraved corners of society, as well as the life available to Truitt, who seems to be limitlessly wealthy.There are secrets within secrets here, but aside from one surprise in the middle of the book, few of the secrets are so very secret after all. I found the setting and the characters interesting and well-drawn and I cared what happened to them, even as they seemed larger than life, nearly mythic. There was more lush, slow description and is my preference, and I found myself skipping paragraphs and whole pages, especially toward the end of the book. This first novel is not without its problems, but its strengths outweigh them.

Life After Life (Kate Atkinson)

I enjoyed this rather odd story, but left it unsatisfied. Ursula Todd is born on a snowy morning in 1910, but dies in childbirth. She is born, and is saved by her doctor, but falls from the roof when she tries to rescue a doll that was tossed out the window. She drowns at the seashore; she is rescued by a stranger. Over and over again, she lives, and dies. It is fascinating to see the events in the world, and in her life, from so many different perspectives, and all the settings and people are beautifully drawn.. Eventually she begins to remember her past lives, and starts trying to manipulate what happens. I really enjoyed it all, but at the end it didn't seem to have gone anywhere. She set herself a specific goal, and I can't even tell whether she accomplished it or not. Aside from this letdown at the end, it is a good story.

The Assault (Harry Mulisch)

This is a powerful story of one small horror from WWII that destroyed a Dutch family and the ways it affected the one of them the rest of his life. One of the hated Nazi collaborators in a small town is shot to death on the street. His body initially fell in front of one house, and then the people living there drag it in front of their neighbor's house. As the neighbors debate what to do, and the hotheaded older son decides to go out and move the body again to protect the family, the Nazi police show up. They pull the family out of the house and set it afire. The younger son is only 12 at the time, and he is taken by the Germans to a prison cell, then turned over to his uncle in Amsterdam to live out the rest of the war. He puts the events of that night out of his mind, and only gradually over the years pieces together what really happened. As moving and affecting as the story is, it didn't grab me. Because the main character works so hard to wall off his feelings for his family's catastrophe, the book felt distant. I was unable to get inside him and feel anything much for his struggle, because he didn't allow himself to feel anything much himself. Thus I was disappointed, and can't give the book the wholehearted endorsement I otherwise would.

The Forgotten Garden (Kate Morton)

This story sprawls over more than 100 years to unravel the mystery of a 4-year-old girl found abandoned on the docks in Australia in 1913. She could tell no one her name or how she came to be there, and nobody ever came to claim her; all she had was a small suitcase with some clothes and a book of fairy tales. A local family took her in, but she spent most of her life trying to discover her past. The mystery was passed down to her granddaughter, who was finally able to uncover the whole story. It was engrossing, moving, horrifying and touching, all at once. I very much enjoyed it.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Karen Joy Fowler)

This is the story of a very unusual family, told from the point of view of the daughter of a research psychologist. The father works in the field of comparative cognition, looking at how the cognitive processes of humans differ from those of rats and other primates - right up my alley! He winds up involving his family directly in his research, though, with dire consequences for everyone concerned. The narrator moves into adulthood dealing with issues of guilt, anger, and fear as a result of the events of her early childhood. I'm dancing around the central events here, because they're not revealed until several chapters in and I don't want to spoil anything from the few folks who don't go in knowing what was happening. The story is gripping, heartbreaking and heartwarming, and manages to claw its way to as happy an ending as the various characters could have. I enjoyed it a lot.