Beth's Picks for August

PLAIN TRUTH BY JODI PICOULT

SUMMARY

Moving seamlessly from psychological drama to courtroom suspense, Plain Truth is a fascinating portrait of Amish life rarely witnessed by those outside the faith. When a young Amish teen hides a pregnancy, gives birth in secret, and then flatly denies it all when the baby's body is found, urban defense attorney Ellie Hathaway decides to defend her. But she finds herself caught in a clash of cultures with a people whose channels of justice are markedly different from her own… and discovers a place where circumstances are not always what they seem.

AUTHOR WEBSITE

http://www.jodipicoult.com/

INTERVIEW WITH JODI PICOULT

http://www.jodipicoult.com/faqs.html

BOOK CLUB DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

http://www.jodipicoult.com/plain-truth.html#questions

REVIEWS

"A suspenseful, richly layered drama… From the very start, Picoult draws readers in… impressive… Picoult's seventh novel never loses its grip. The research is convincing, the plotting taut, the scenes wonderfully vivid… [An} absorbing, multidimensional portrait of an Amish clan… a hummer of a tale." —People, (starred review)

"Appealing, suspenseful… Reads like a cross between the Harrison Ford movie Witness and Scott Turow's novel Presumed Innocent, with a dose of television's The Practice thrown in to spice up the legal dilemmas." —Arizona Republic

Ellie Hathaway is a successful but disillusioned defense attorney who needs to get away from the often guilty people she has been defending in court. She flees Philadelphia for Paradise, PA, the small town where she spent idyllic childhood summers. Shortly before Ellie arrives at her aunt's house, a young Amish girl is accused of murdering her newborn son in her parents' barn. Ellie's aunt, who is related to the family, believes that the girl is innocent and asks Ellie to defend her. The judge orders Katie to be released into Ellie's custody, and Ellie reluctantly moves onto the dairy farm that Katie's family operates while she prepares her defense. Picoult (The Pact) offers an interesting look into Amish culture and beliefs and the effect they have on various people. Her courtroom scenes are exciting and realistic, but a surprising twist at the very end just doesn't ring true. Nonetheless, public libraries will want this well-paced story, which focuses on a unique way of life.--Library Journal

YA--Philadelphia defense lawyer Ellie Hathaway retreats to her great Aunt Leda's home in Paradise, PA, to get a break from her high-pressure job. Almost at the same time that she arrives, a dead baby is discovered in the barn of an Amish farmer. A police investigation reveals that the mother is an 18-year-old unmarried Amish girl, Katie Fisher, and that the infant apparently did not die of natural causes. Even in the face of medical proof that she recently gave birth, Katie denies the murder charge. Ellie reluctantly agrees to defend her, even though she does not want to be defended. To better understand her client, Ellie moves into the farmhouse with the Fisher family where she begins to see firsthand the pressures and sacrifices of those who live "plain." As she searches for evidence in this case, she calls upon a friend from her past, Dr. John Cooper, a psychiatrist. As Coop and Ellie work together to unravel fact and fiction, they also work to resolve issues in their relationship. Readers will experience a psychological drama as well as a suspenseful courtroom trial. The contrast between the Amish culture and the "English" provides an interesting tension. This study of opposites details much information about a way of life based on faith, humility, duty, and hon-esty.--School Library Journal

Classic Suggestion August 2010

Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

One of Thomas Hardy's most powerful works, The Return of the Native centers famously on Egdon Heath, the wild, haunted Wessex moor that D. H. Lawrence called "the real stuff of tragedy." The heath's changing face mirrors the fortunes of the farmers, inn-keepers, sons, mothers, and lovers who populate the novel. The "native" is Clym Yeobright, who comes home from a cosmopolitan life in Paris. He; his cousin Thomasin; her fiancé, Damon Wildeve; and the willful Eustacia Vye are the protagonists in a tale of doomed love, passion, alienation, and melancholy as Hardy brilliantly explores that theme so familiar throughout his fiction: the diabolical role of chance in determining the course of a life.

Popular Fiction and Bestseller Suggestion August 2010

Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott

Editorial Review:
It is sobering to think that Rosie Ferguson is your typical teenage girl. On one hand, she’s in the throes of her senior year in high school: concerned with body image and boyfriends, BFFs and boredom, and, of course, the daily trauma of living with parents who are so hopelessly, well, hopeless. On the other hand, she is an adept addict who’s never met a substance she wouldn’t abuse or a male she wouldn’t seduce. Juggling these two worlds demands bigger and more frequent scores, and more facile lies, while Rosie’s parents, recovering alcoholic Elizabeth and workaholic stepfather James, are reluctant to enforce even the lamest disciplinary rules for fear of losing Rosie’s love—until one night when her world comes crashing down, and Elizabeth and James have no choice but to send Rosie to a wilderness rehab program. Reprising characters from her previous novels, Rosie (1997) and Crooked Little Heart (1998), Lamott intuitively taps into the teenage drug culture to create a vivid, unsettling portrait of a family in crisis. As she eschews the cunning one-liners and wry observations that had become her signature stock-in-trade, Lamott produces her most stylistically mature and thematically circumspect novel to date.            
--Carol Haggas from Booklist

Author Interview and Book Discussion Questions

Best in Books August 2010

Twelve Sharp by Janet Evanovich

Twelve Sharp is the 2006 Quill Book Award winner. This award recognizes achievement in writing and publishing, established with the goal of creating more interest in books and literacy. US-marketed titles are first nominated by a specific group of booksellers and librarians who then choose the top five for each of nineteen award categories. Final winners are chosen by the reading public. While this is no longer an active award it does highlight the popularity of Evanovich’s books by the public. I have never read any of the preceding books in the series, but had no problem getting into this fun, fast-paced story. The characters are written to involve the reader immediately, making it a good book to have on vacation when you finally have the time to get through a book in a few sittings.

Janet Evanovich website

Review:
In a manner almost elegant in its offhandedness, Stephanie Plum gets us up to speed on her life as a bounty hunter in Trenton, NJ; her ever-eccentric family; and her fellows in her cousin's bail-bond office. It doesn't take more than a few pages. Then someone who is mistaken for Ranger--one of the two men in and out of Stephanie's life (the other is Morelli the cop)--is accused of kidnapping his daughter. Evanovich uses all of her considerable arsenal here: wisecracking humor and set pieces about cars, neighborhoods, family matters, and the funeral parlor (now with new directors straight out of Queer Eye for the Burg Guy). Then, at one point, both Morelli and Ranger are living out of Stephanie's apartment (she flees to her childhood bedroom). Evanovich also deftly uses celebrity stalking and identity theft to sketch a quite scary bad guy, and she creates in Ranger's daughter, Julie, a spirited 10-year-old version of her mesmerizing father. The ending is downright terrifying, but the coda is soothing and features a cake with icing roses. Kids? Cupcakes? What could possibly be next? --GraceAnne DeCandido Copyright 2006 Booklist

Classic Suggestion for July

Howards End by E.M. Forster

Like all of Forster's work, Howards End concerns itself with class, nationality, economic status, and how each of these affects personal relationships. It follows the intertwined fortunes of the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and the Wilcox family over the course of several years. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes, on the other hand, can't be bothered with the life of the mind or the heart, leading, instead, outer lives of "telegrams and anger" that foster "such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization." Helen, after a brief flirtation with one of the Wilcox sons, has developed an antipathy for the family; Margaret, however, forms a brief but intense friendship with Mrs. Wilcox, which is cut short by the older woman's death. When her family discovers a scrap of paper requesting that Henry give their home, Howards End, to Margaret, it precipitates a spiritual crisis among them that will take years to resolve.


Forster's 1910 novel begins as a collection of seemingly unrelated events--Helen's impulsive engagement to Paul Wilcox; a chance meeting between the Schlegel sisters and an impoverished clerk named Leonard Bast at a concert; a casual conversation between the sisters and Henry Wilcox in London one night. But as it moves along, these disparate threads gradually knit into a tightly woven fabric of tragic misunderstandings, impulsive actions, and irreparable consequences, and, eventually, connection. Though set in the early years of the 20th century, Howards End seems even more suited to our own fragmented era of e-mails and anger. For readers living in such an age, the exhortation to "only connect" resonates ever more profoundly.               - Review from Amazon.com

Book Disuccsion Guide

Best in Books July 2010

The Ghost by Robert Harris

The Ghost is the 2008 Thriller Award for Best Novel sponsored by the International Thriller Writers (ITW). The story's narrator has been hired to ghost write former British Prime Minister, Adam Lang's memoirs after the first collaborator's body is mysteriously found on the shore of Martha’s Vineyard. Lang’s character is a thinly veiled version of Tony Blair and his term in office. The astronomical offer to clean up the first draft is too attractive not to accept even with a tight completion deadline. The anonymous ghost writer has to quickly learn the voice of his subject creating a fast-paced rhythm. As the writer interviews and studies his subject, he is faced with research that points to a man with a questionable background full of dark and evil secrets.

Robert Harris's background as a BBC television correspondent and newspaper columnist add to the authenticity of this political thriller.


Booklist Review
Best-selling author Harris scores again with this intriguing political thriller. On the heels of historical blockbusters Pompeii (2003) and Imperium (2006), Harris now turns his attention to more timely issues. When a celebrity ghostwriter is tapped to be the pen behind the man for the controversial former prime minister of Britain, he gets much more than he bargained for. Although his predecessor died under suspicious circumstances, the anonymous ghostwriter finds the lucrative offer to assist the infamous Adam Lang in cobbling together his memoirs even if it means staying on a desolate Martha's Vineyard in the dead of winter too hard to resist. Not unexpectedly, Lang harbors more dangerous secrets than it is safe for any one person to possess, and the ghostwriter finds himself increasingly enmeshed in a tangled web of treachery, deceit, and international espionage as he unravels a political cover-up that will resonate with contemporary readers. As it turns out, there is more than one ghost, and the fast-paced narrative concludes with an unexpected twist. Expect considerable demand.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2007 Booklist

BETH'S JULY PICK

LOVING FRANK

By Nancy Horan



REVIEWS

From The New Yorker
In 1904, Frank Lloyd Wright started work on a house for an Oak Park couple, Edwin and Mamah Cheney, and, before long, he and Mamah had begun a scandalous affair. In her first novel, Horan, viewing the relationship from Mamah’s perspective, does well to avoid serving up a bodice-ripper for the smart set. If anything, she cleaves too faithfully to the sources, occasionally giving her story the feel of a dissertation masquerading as a novel. But she succeeds in conveying the emotional center of her protagonist, whom she paints as a proto-feminist, an educated woman fettered by the role of bourgeois matriarch. Horan best evokes Mamah’s troubled personality by means of delicately rendered reflections on the power of the natural world, from which her lover drew inspiration: watching her children rapturously observe a squirrel as it pulls apart wheat buds or taking pride in the way the house that Wright built for them in Wisconsin frames the landscape.

From Publisher’s Weekly
Horan's ambitious first novel is a fictionalization of the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, best known as the woman who wrecked Frank Lloyd Wright's first marriage. Despite the title, this is not a romance, but a portrayal of an independent, educated woman at odds with the restrictions of the early 20th century. Frank and Mamah, both married and with children, met when Mamah's husband, Edwin, commissioned Frank to design a house. Their affair became the stuff of headlines when they left their families to live and travel together, going first to Germany, where Mamah found rewarding work doing scholarly translations of Swedish feminist Ellen Key's books. Frank and Mamah eventually settled in Wisconsin, where they were hounded by a scandal-hungry press, with tragic repercussions. Horan puts considerable effort into recreating Frank's vibrant, overwhelming personality, but her primary interest is in Mamah, who pursued her intellectual interests and love for Frank at great personal cost. As is often the case when a life story is novelized, historical fact inconveniently intrudes: Mamah's life is cut short in the most unexpected and violent of ways, leaving the narrative to crawl toward a startlingly quiet conclusion. Nevertheless, this spirited novel brings Mamah the attention she deserves as an intellectual and feminist.

From Amazon.com Review
It's a rare treasure to find a historically imagined novel that is at once fully versed in the facts and unafraid of weaving those truths into a story that dares to explore the unanswered questions. Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney's love story is--as many early reviews of Loving Frank have noted--little-known and often dismissed as scandal. In Nancy Horan's skillful hands, however, what you get is two fully realized people, entirely, irrepressibly, in love. Together, Frank and Mamah are a wholly modern portrait, and while you can easily imagine them in the here and now, it's their presence in the world of early 20th century America that shades how authentic and, ultimately, tragic their story is. Mamah's bright, earnest spirit is particularly tender in the context of her time and place, which afforded her little opportunity to realize the intellectual life for which she yearned. Loving Frank is a remarkable literary achievement, tenderly acute and even-handed in even the most heartbreaking moments, and an auspicious debut from a writer to watch.

AUTHOR HOME PAGE
http://www.nancyhoran.com/


INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR
http://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm?author_number=1480

LIVE CHAT WITH THE AUTHOR
http://books.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977077718

BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS
http://www.litlovers.com/guide_lovgfrank.html

BETH’S COMMENTS:
I really liked reading a fictional account of a real person versus their biography or autobiography. The mixture of fiction and real life made you think even more. The ending of the story will blow your mind!