FAW Literature Committee Favorites 2017-2018
by Literature Committee Members
May, 2018
Each year the Literature Awards Committee reads and reviews dozens of books for selection of the current year award winners. Here are a few of this years favorites as reviewed by the Awards Committee members.
The Bricklayer of Albany Park by Terry John Malik
Several members of our reading committee were passionate about this book,a psychological thriller set in a Chicago by mature a new Chicago author. Readers familiar with the city are able to visualize exactly where the characters are operating.
The Bricklayer of Albany Park features Detective Francis "Frank" Vincenti. Frank was a troubled young man in need of direction when he enrolled in a college criminal justice class taught by Thomas Aquinas Foster, a former Chicago PD. Foster mentors Frank, who later establishes himself as a police detective with a reputation for getting inside a killer's mind. After years of successful arrests, Vicenti comes up against his match, the notorious "Bricklayer," a serial killer who mutilates his victims and leaves them to be discovered in public spaces. Foster serves as a sounding board during the investigation, but also plays with the killer's mind, adding further intrigue to the story.
This book offers a close look into several tortured minds, and as secrets are peeled away, more questions bubble to the surface. The book asks, "Does it take a monster to catch a monster?" The answer comes as a shock. This book, in all its gore, is an exciting read.
Tammie Bob
Bad Kansas by Becky Mandelbaum
Newcomer Becky Mandelbaum brings wit and wisdom to this collection of short stories whose quirky characters can't decide if they want to stay in Kansas or leave it.
In the story "A Million and One Marthas," a teenaged girl named Laney is thrilled when Paige, who presides over the school lunchroom's "Deluxe Table," invites her to her house, which is actually more like a mansion. Laney makes her first mistake when she assumes that Martha, the house-keeper, is Paige's mother. But her second mistake, when she encounters Paige's darkly handsome "brother," is even more problematic.
The story "Go On,Eat Your Heart Out" features a protagonist named Patty, who, shortly after breaking up with her boyfriend, Ryan, steps on the scale only to find that she now weighs 188 pounds. "How had this happened?" she wonders, as the words "Great White Whale" come to her. To get herself back in shape, and perhaps win Ryan back, she joins the Hard Core Fitness gym and limits her daily caloric intake to a vanilla-flavored protein shake and "exactly fourteen purple grapes." But somewhere along the way, she discovers that there are things she wants more than a svelte figure - or even Ryan.
And in the story "Queen of England," an eleven-year-old unnamed narrator struggles between his desire to please his single mother, who has finally found a man who wants to marry her, and his thirteen-year-old brother, Dewey, whose mission in life is to drive this man (his real name is Walter but Dewey calls him Weenie) out of their lives. Though the dynamics of the story are familiar, Mandelbaum's empathy makes the reader identify with all of the characters. They are caught in a terrible situation, but they are rambunctiously true to themselves.
Bad Kansas, which won the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, contains 11 stories, and there's not a bad one in the bunch. Each of them is closely observed, emotionally intelligent - and just plain fun!
Roberta Gates
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund
Fourteen-year-old Madeline Furston lives an off-the-grid life in northern Minnesota, feeling at home in the natural world, but sadly lost in any other. Though her name is Madeline, she's known as Linda, Commie, or Freak at her middle school, where Mr. Grierson, a substitute history teacher, pays a lot of attention to the cheerleaders and especially to the sleek-haired Lily Holburn who's given to wearing sheer sweaters. Yet, for some reason, he taps Linda to compete in the History Odyssey. Her presentation on the history of wolves doesn't quite meet the requirements, but she's fierce when she answers one of the judge's questions, declaring, "Wolves have nothing to do with humans, actually. If they can help it, they avoid them."
Linda herself is wolf-like, sometimes seeming like the prey, sometimes the predator. Unable to understand the motivations of her teachers and fellow students--or even her own--she is irredeemably drawn to the Gardeners, city people who have moved in across the lake from her parents' ramshackle cabin, which is the last remnant of a defunct commune. When Patra Gardener hires her as a babysitter, Linda develops an overwhelming attachment to Paul, the Gardeners' four-year-old son. But with this new sense of belonging come secrets she doesn't understand. Something is amiss in this family, and if Linda isn't immediately aware of it, the reader certainly is. There is a palpable sense of dread in almost every sentence.
Fridlund brings an exceptional use of language to this debut novel, which is partly a mystery and partly a coming-of-age story. But it is much more than either. Heartbreaking and disturbing by turns, it takes the reader by the nape of the neck and shakes him or her hard, the way a wolf might.
History of Wolves has won a lot of acclaim. It was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Awards, as well as a New York Times Editors' Choice, a USA Today Notable Book, a #1 Indie Next Pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, and an Amazon Spotlight Pick.
So read this book! It is one you'll never forget!
Roberta Gates
Flood by Melissa Scholes Young
Flood, a charming first novel by Melissa Scholes Young, tells the story of Laura Brooks, a girl from a small town in Missouri, specifically Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain's hometown. Laura left Hannibal in 1993, the year of a devastating flood of the Mississippi. The story begins ten years after the flood. Laura has lost her job as a Certified Nurse Assistant (CNA) in Florida and has suffered a miscarriage. She has returned home ostensibly to attend her high school reunion. In reality she has come home to decide if she should stay in Hannibal permanently. Laura has given herself until the 4th of July to decide if she is home for good.
Back in Hannibal, Laura has to contend with her consistently negative mother and her best friend Rose, who has a mean streak. She finds some comfort with her Aunt Betty, and puts her hopes in her godson, Bobby, who is in a contest to play Tom Sawyer. And of course, there is a potential love interest, Sammy, who was Laura's boyfriend ten years ago. Something mysterious caused Laura to break up with Sammy, who appears to be a paragon of virtue.
Young knows Hannibal and its people. The descriptive details reflect the disintegration of Hannibal but also apply to small town America in general. When Laura arrives home she finds her mother sleeping in a chair, "Mama is dozing in her recliner waiting for the late news to announce the flood stages and her Lotto numbers. When you can see the Mississippi out your windows, flood stages are your religion. And when you can't imagine how to dig yourself out of a hole, you put your faith in the Powerball."
I was reminded of lyrics from a song by Brandy Clark, "We pray to Jesus, and we play the Lotto/ cause they're aint but two ways we can change tomorrow." Laura hoped that getting a degree and moving away from Hannibal would be a way to change the future of marriage, kids, and trying to make ends meet. Now that she has returned home, will she stay? Will she get back with Sammy? If she stays, will she still be able to make a better life? Readers looking for an easy read with some details about Mark Twain and his books, should find the answers by reading Flood.
Ida Hagman
How to Behave in a Crowd by Camille Bordas
Camille Cordas is a Chicago transplant from France, and while she published two books in French, her third book is in English, lucky for us. It is utterly charming and very hard to categorize, quite unlike any other novel that comes to mind. It's playful, dark spirit brings to mind the film "The Royal Tenembaums."
Isidore (Dorie) is the adolescent narrator trying to navigate the confusion of his life in a dazzlingly dysfunctional family. Arrogant and agoraphobic, his older brothers and sisters cope by writing dissertations, composing music, criticizing everyone, and creating a border wall of arrogant brilliance from which to fend off the real world of loss and grief. Only Dorie, or Izzie, as he prefers to be called, seems to engage with a universe in which his father suddenly dies, his mother retreats; his siblings ignore him and struggles to make sense of it all.
Izzie's "friends" are "a basket of deplorables:" a suicidal anorexic classmate, a surly senior citizen, a German teacher who hates his job, and a scheming bully. Deaths proliferate in this darkly humorous novel: first, "the father" whose role in the family is purely titular, and ultimately Denise, whose depression is the black hole into which he chooses not to be drawn. Instead, he comforts his mother by reading her to sleep, validates his beautiful but childlike sisters, saves Madame from dying of a stroke, comforts Denise's parents and does it all with a huge heart and remarkable emotional intelligence. It is not a dissertation, but instead the young hero's innate wisdom that teaches us how to behave in a crowd. Bordas celebrates his coming of age in this alternately tragic and funny novel as she writes Izzie into young manhood in English, her second language, but one in which she is remarkably at home.
Freyda Libman
The Winners
The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler
We like books that surprise us, books can't easily categorize as "just like a typical book." Still, it might be a bit surprising that a committee formed of women perhaps a bit past "a certain age" would be enamored of a book set mostly in a Boy Scout camp, a book that is certainly man-centered. But we do know men: husbands, sons, brothers, fathers, etc.; and in this book we recognized aspects of them we like, and many we don't. Most often, the turns of the story led us to empathize with its richly drawn characters.
Author Nickolas Butler, of rural Wisconsin, isn't afraid to tackle big ideas in his writing. Butler's third book, set in and around the fictional Camp Chippewa in Northern Wisconsin, seeks to understand the weighty subject of its title.
Told in four parts, spanning 1962 to 2019, The Hearts of Men follows two families through three generations. The camp in all its smoky, woodsy glory serves as the crucible through which they all must pass as they struggle to understand their relationships with one another and seek to find meaning in the wake of war and tragedy.
It's summer of 1962 and the high-achieving but socially awkward Nelson Doughty, antique bugle in hand, prepares for the morning reveille at Camp Chippewa. Scenes from his life unspool, revealing a young man desperate for not only approval but also guidance. The struggling Nelson finds a kindred spirit in Scoutmaster Wilbur, the old-school-take-no-guff leader of Camp Chippewa who becomes foundational in the formation of the Nelson we return to later in the book.
At Camp Chippewa we're also introduced to athletic, charismatic Jonathan Quick, a boy who seems to have it all. Where Nelson is frail, the object of taunts and violence because of his perceived weakness - "I have to be smarter than them. I can't fight them all at once," he thinks at one point - Jonathan reveals himself to be weak in another way. In a hair-raising camp hazing scene Nelson emerges from a perilous predicament with a new understanding of both his own character and Jonathan's as well.
And this is really what the book is about. The Hearts of Men is a deep dive into the subject of what makes a man, flaws and all. Butler uses Nelson, Quick, and their families to challenge our assumptions about character, forcing the reader to consider what it actually is and how to know if we have it.
Thirty-four years after that formative summer at Camp Chippewa, Jonathan Quick's teenage son Trevor gets a hard lesson in character from his father and Nelson. Over drinks at the Stardust Supper Club, Trevor meets Deanne, his father's long-time mistress, and receives from Jonathan a litany of complaints about both his mother and his high school sweetheart, Rachel. A confused and repulsed (and slightly drunk) Trevor receives a bit of advice from Nelson as the men head to a strip club. "You might not understand now, or even in a few years, but ... try to give your Dad a break, if you can," says Nelson. "All you can do is try to be a better man, you know? You take moments like this and you learn from them. You think to yourself, this isn't the dad I want to be. This isn't the husband I want to be."
In the final section we meet an adult Rachel, who went on to marry Trevor, and their teenage son Thomas back at Camp Chippewa where an elderly Nelson is now Scoutmaster Doughty. It's 2019, and what it means to spend a week in the woods in search of character is called into question in the age of Google and digital devices (not to mention that earning merit badges for tying knots is, like, so uncool). But, when a moment arises for Thomas to make a fateful decision, he finds strength in the "uncool" lessons of his father and Nelson for a scene that brings the novel to a chilling, yet hopeful, conclusion.
Nickolas Butler will be joining us May 4 for the FAW Awards luncheon, and promises to be as entertaining as his book. Hope to see you there.
Tammie Bob
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah
Of all the joys of being a member of FAW's Literature Awards Committee, none is greater than opening a new book, with no particular expectations of it, only to find yourself transported to a story's time and place, aching for its characters, and delighting in a fresh, beautiful narrative voice. Reading the book is a physical experience: you hold your breath with excitement; your flesh tingles. It doesn't happen often, but it did, for many of us, when we read Lesley Nneka Arimah's collection of twelve short stories, What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. It was at the top of our list from the beginning.
Arimah, born in the UK, raised largely in Nigeria, and now resident in Minneapolis, has a heritage blended in Africa and the West; and this blend informs the stories in her debut book. Most of the stories are set in a recognizable Nigeria, with past events like the Biafran War contrasting with real and imagined future scenarios. Biafra is a point of reference for a father and war veteran curbing his daughter's habit of "vigilante schoolyard justice" in "War Stories," and serves as an older sister's name in "The Future Looks Good," whose twist ending mocks the title's optimism.
The protagonists are mostly young women poised on the brink of wildness, trying out what's dangerous and what's expected, looking for a shape of the future. The title of "Light" refers to the spirit a father senses in his fourteen-year-old daughter. After all the physical and emotional changes they've successfully negotiated over the three years his wife has been studying for her MBA in the United States, he fears the girl's spirit will be broken when she leaves Nigeria to go live with her strict mother. In "Glory," the opposite trajectory is the repressive one: Glorybetogod, working in a Minneapolis call center, knows that if she accepts Thomas's marriage proposal she's signing on for a move back to Nigeria and a new identity as a traditional wife and mother. "Girls with fire in their bellies will be forced to drink from a well of correction till the flames die out," the final story, "Redemption," warns.
Three of the stories employ magic realism to infuse everyday situations with novel possibilities. "Second Chances" has a mother returning eight years after her death, while "Who Will Greet You at Home" imagines that babies are crafted out of yarn or clay and come to life when given a special blessing. In the title story, set in a dystopian future in which Britain and most of North America have been wiped out, Nneoma is a "Mathematician" who calculates people's grief and takes it away from them. She's an expert at spotting the sadness of refugees and the bereaved, but the collective weight of their grief threatens to crush her.
Arimah's stories ring true as they explore the complex relationships between families, focusing often on the bonds between mother and daughter. Not everything is picture-perfect in the lives of these women - a fact made clearer in each sequential story. But it wouldn't be as real or powerful if their lives were sugarcoated. Arimah tells the story of women who have suffered, women who have worked day in and day out to succeed, not only for themselves but also for their children.
These women are raw, messy and dirty - and yet even when they struggle, their is power within them. It's a power that is not often touched on in pop culture, and yet it's one that so many young women hold. In Arimah's stories, things are often bad, but life goes on, and her female characters persevere along the way.
This is a beautiful set of tales about human foibles and sorrows. As someone complains to the Mathematicians in the title story, "You shouldn't be stopping a person from feeling natural hardships. That's what it means to be human." The tone is balances between playful and melancholy, and the variety in narration and setup keeps things interesting--each story is individual, entirely distinct and different from the others.
Ms. Arimah will be at the May 4th Awards Luncheon to speak to us, accept her prize, and sign books. Don't miss this opportunity to meet this young author with a very big future.
Tammie Bob
