Book Bites: Ask Alice
By popular demand! This week, we're eschewing our usual roundup of recent staff favorites in favor of something a little more specific. If you've shopped our store for a while, you probably know Alice. And if you know Alice, you understand implicitly that she'll never steer you towards a bad read. So we've collected a few of Alice's recent favorites—some you can buy now, some you'll have to wait to read until next year—and offer them here as a starter-pack for your 2021 TBR list. Trust us: You're going to love these. Read on!
On Our Shelves Now
Jack by Marilynne Robinson
The Prodigal Son meets Romeo and Juliet in this graceful and elegant story of forbidden interracial love. Jack Ames Boughton is the son of a Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa, who has spent his entire life lying, stealing, and being a well-read bum, relying on regular financial support from a brother. Della Miles is the daughter of a Methodist (AME) bishop in Memphis, a smart and headstrong high school English teacher. They meet by chance and fall in love in a time when miscegenation is a prisonable crime. There's a lot of lovely dialog in this somewhat slow-moving but compelling story of a meeting of minds. And, as she does in all her novels, Robinson manages to present a fully-fleshed out philosophy of life that makes you copy out sentence after sentence so you can remember them.
— Alice
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Available for Shipping (Note: We'll try our best, but we cannot guarantee whether these books will arrive in time for the holidays.)
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
This brilliant work of historical fiction tells the story of Agnes, a young woman who lives in Stratford-upon-Avon in the closing years of the 16th century. She marries a young Latin tutor and they have three children before the Latin tutor goes to London where he becomes involved in the theater, writing plays and acting (yes, THAT playwright), and not coming home as much as Agnes would like. When the bubonic plague sweeps the country, her 11-year old son Hamnet succumbs, and Agnes is overcome by grief that she has to bear alone for the most part. Gorgeous writing and vivid details about 16th-century lifestyle and the plague make this one of the best books I've read this year.
— Alice
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The Great Offshore Grounds by Vanessa Veselka
There is a mystery surrounding the births of Livy and Cheyenne. They've known since girlhood that though they had the same father and were born on the same day, each had a different mother. One of the mothers raised both girls on her own, and the other joined a Zen Buddhist monastery. As the novel opens, the girls -- now in their early 30s -- are attending their hippie father's wedding to a girl younger than they. He is moving to China and has decided to give them their only inheritance -- the name of the absent mother. Of course, this starts the girls on an odyssey, but it's more than a search for the missing mother. Raised in near poverty, the girls and their adopted younger brother, Essex, struggle to make ends meet -- Cheyenne works odd jobs and freeloads off her mother and sister, Livy makes some money working on fishing boats off the coast of Alaska, and Essex decides to join the Marines. The story moves across the United States from Seattle to the swamps of North Carolina and out into the Pacific Ocean as we follow the three siblings as they try to figure out who they are and the meaning of life. Readers are pulled along at a breathtaking pace by brilliant writing and vivid descriptions of the often hard-to-believe experiences the three have.
— Alice
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Monogamy by Sue Miller
Graham and Annie have been married for decades, a second marriage for both. Graham is a large, ebullient book store owner, and Annie is a petite, reserved photographer. Despite their differences -- and, to some extent, because of them -- they have a good and loving relationship. Then one night, Graham dies in his sleep. Shortly afterward, Annie discovers a secret that changes her understanding of her husband's character, and makes her reevaluate her marriage. Miller describes in beautiful language the realities of the grieving process that Annie experiences, a process that is both classic in its stages and complicated by her new understanding of her marriage. It's an insightful exploration of the connection between people after death. Recommended.
—Alice
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D (A Tale of Two Worlds) by Michel Faber
Faber pays homage to C.S. Lewis and Charles Dickens in this intriguing tale of a strong young girl who courageously tries to set the world right. Dhikilo is a 13-year old refugee from Somaliland, who has been adopted by an English couple. As she copes with being different from her peers, she becomes friendly with her history teacher, the ancient Professor Dodderfield, the only person of her acquaintance who knows where Somaliland is. One day, she notices that the letter D is disappearing, first from road signs, then in people's conversations. Mysterious events at Dodderfield's funeral lead her to the professor's home, where she finds him alive in the company of his dog, Mrs. Robinson, who can turn into an intimidating sphinx. The Professor encourages Dhikilo and Mrs. Robinson to try to find out where all the Ds are going, and their mission takes them to the land of Liminus, where they encounter strange groups of individuals who are enslaved by a dictator, the Gamp, who is using the Ds to maintain his empire in perpetual winter. There are harrowing adventures, a bit of magic, and imaginative characters that come to life in Faber's witty and compelling prose. Though this is adult fiction, it would be a great read-aloud to children who enjoy the same scary yet wonderful story-telling of the Narnia tales.
— Alice
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Available for Pre-Order
My Year Abroad by Chang-Rae Lee
Ambitionless and easy going, Tiller (who was abandoned by his mother when he was in elementary school) is working a couple of odd jobs after his sophomore year in college as he waits to start his junior year abroad program. A chance encounter with a group of Asian-American businessmen leads to a very different year abroad than what he had imagined. Though Tiller doesn't quite understand why these entrepreneurs welcome him to their business meetings, he's flattered by their attention and willingly accepts an invitation to help one of them, a Chinese-American chemist named Pong, develop a health beverage that he plans to source in Asia and sell worldwide. Traveling with Pong on what was to be a short trip to China, Tiller finds himself caught up in a vortex of high stakes business deals and an accompanying life style that soon turns dark and bizarre. Several months later, Tiller is on his way back to the U.S. when he runs into a mother and her tween son who are entering a witness protection program. Still recovering from his strange time in China, Tiller feels compelled to move in with Val and her son, Victor, Jr., rather than return to his home, father, and college career. The narration weaves back and forth between Tiller's time in China, where, like Tiller, the reader is left in the dark about what is going on, and his life undercover in suburban New Jersey, where at only 20 years old, he becomes a kind of surrogate father to Victor, who is becoming a culinary phenom. The novel is so well-written that it pulls the reader into the crazy life of a kid who has never quite figured out who he is and what he wants in life.
— Alice
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City of A Thousand Gates by Rebecca Sacks
In this debut novel, the author describes with equal empathy and compassion the conflicted and complicated lives of more than a dozen characters who live side by side but separately in modern Israel, aka occupied Palestine: Ori and his mates who are doing their compulsory military service for Israel, Emily and Rachel, young Jewish Americans who have emigrated to Israel, Samar, a Muslim professor at Bethlehem University, Mai, a university student from a wealthy Palestinian family, Vera, a German journalist, and several more. Their lives intersect in serendipitous ways during a tense period in Palestinian-Israeli relations after the deaths of two young teenagers, one Israeli and one Palestinian. This is a story of walls and barbed wire, of checkpoints and guns, of the legacy of dispossession, and of the irony of a previously subjugated people now subjugating another group of people to ensure their own safety.
— Alice
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The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen
What does it mean to be a revolutionary? What is one willing to die for? Can a refugee ever feel at home in a new country?
In this brilliant follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Sympathizer, Nguyen continues the story of his biracial protagonist who has managed to survive reeducation in Vietnam after a brief career as an undercover Communist spy in the United States, and who, having escaped from Vietnam, has recently arrived in France, the country of his father. Through connections in the Vietnamese community, he and his blood brother land jobs in a mediocre Vietnamese restaurant that is owned by a Vietnamese drug dealer. When the Sympathizer is not cleaning toilets or delivering drugs and fending off attacks by Arab drug dealers, he spends his time reading political writers and trying to figure out his own conflicted political beliefs. The sometimes bizarre action is offset by the narrator’s tortured thoughts as he writes out his “confession” after having a mental breakdown. It’s a remarkable story of a man’s attempt to understand how he has survived his birth, upbringing, and adult experiences in a society where “the revolutionaries have become the state, the state has become repressive, and the bullets, once used against the oppressor in the name of the people, will be used against the people in their own name.”
— Alice
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