Kay's Lucky Coin Variety by Ann Y.K Choi

What a fantastic book this was - I read it in an afternoon!  The story is told from the perspective of teenaged Mary whose family immigrated to Toronto from South Korea when she was a child.  Her parents work tirelessly operating a downtown corner store in order to provide Mary and her brother Josh with better lives.

The author beautifully illustrates the struggle immigrant children, and particularly girls, face when trying to reconcile the hopes, dreams and values of their parents, with their own which are shaped by the Canadian society around them.

Mary very much wants to be a writer, but her parents want her to study something more practical - law or education.  They also want her to marry a nice Korean boy and go to great lengths to arrange a match for her.  Instead she has a terrible crush on her white, older English teacher.  When she graduates from high school she is faced with choosing between these two men as well as deciding what to pursue in university.

In addition to Mary's family there are a host of other interesting supporting characters - Korean friends and family, Mary's diverse group of high school friends, the old Irish woman who lives near the store, and the taxi driver, homeless man and prostitutes who frequent the store...

Unfortunately it takes a tragic event (which I won't give away) for Mary to begin to sort out who she is and how she wants her future to unfold.

I especially enjoyed the book because of all the familiar Toronto places but I think anyone who is interested in a coming of age story, coupled with that of the immigrant experience, would enjoy this book.  It's very well written and easy to read.

Winter Vacation Reading List

News from the Red Desert by Kevin Patterson

This was a really interesting twist on the typical "war in Afghanistan" novel.  Most of the action takes place on the Kandahar military base.  The war is seen from the perspective of several US and Canadian soldiers, a female journalist embedded with the army (and also a former lover of one of the generals), several Pakistani nationals who run a coffee shop on the base and even a Thai woman who works as a "masseuse" on the base.  Initially we see the soldiers in 2001 when they believe they have finished off the Taliban and won one of the fastest wars in history.  But most of the action takes place in 2007 when it becomes clear the war is far from over.

There are definitely many gruesome scenes as one would expect in a war story, but because the story jumps so rapidly between characters,  I didn't feel myself getting attached to anyone in particular.  It was interesting to imagine how the war would look not only to Westerners, but to Pakistanis who are torn as they make their living off the foreign soldiers but feel kinship with the Afghans.

I really enjoyed how the chapters were short and broken into even shorter subsections so we constantly saw situations from more than one angle.  There was also no clear statement on whether the war made sense - really from anyone's perspective.

I recommend this book to anyone who would like to get a different, if fictional, view of the Afghan war.

The Hopefuls by Jennifer Close

This book was a fairly humours account of political life in Washington.  Matt is a young lawyer who has always dreamed of running for office.  He joins to Obama political campaign and, after inauguration is offered a job in the counsel's office so he and his wife move to DC from New York.  Beth, who is a writer and not involved in politics at all, struggles with the lifestyle.  Everyone is obsessed with their position in the government - even making cocktail party discussion revolve around their respective security clearances.  She is miserable until they meet Jimmy and Ashleigh, a young couple from Texas.  Jimmy is also a behind the scenes politician and when he starts to advance more quickly than Matt we see the tension this brings to all involved.

I wouldn't say this is a deep or even terribly fascinating book but it was compelling enough to keep me interested on vacation.

Julia's Daughters by Colleen Faulkner

The premise of this book was really dark and difficult - Julia's oldest daughter, Haley, runs a stop sign and her sister Caitlin who is in the car dies.  The book deals with how Julia, her husband and her youngest daughter try to accept the situation as an accident without laying too much blame on Haley. And, of course it deals with Haley's guilt and consequential rebellious behaviour - particularly as she hides several truths about that night from everyone around her.  In a bold move Julia decides to drive Haley across the country hoping she will have to open up if they are in the car for days on end.  The drive itself and the resulting insights all of the family members take away from it are a very interesting read.

That being said, it was a bit too hard for me to read about a family dealing with this type of nightmare scenario.  Not relaxing holiday reading.

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

All I can say about this book is persevere.  I really struggled with the first half which was written from the perspective of Lotto.  Lotto and Mathilde marry when they are 22.  We follow the ups and downs of their marriage as he is disinherited for marrying her and constantly worries that she will leave him.  We also see his struggle to survive as an actor and then playwright.  Frankly I did not find him terribly sympathetic and I found parts of the book downright weird (like when they include an opera Lotto wrote).

But they I got to the second half which is told from Mathilde's perspective.  Here we see all kinds of secrets that were kept by many parties involved - and everything looks completely different.  I don't want to give anything away so I won't get into the details.  But I really was glad I persevered when I almost put the book down before I got halfway there.

The Nix by Nathan Hill

This was a long and complicated book, but very engaging.  The main character was Samuel, a thirty something English professor at a lesser known junior college outside Chicago.  Samuel is also a once promising author who published one story, got a book deal and never wrote the book.  Mostly he plays video games, never having recovered from his mother abandoning him when he was 11 and losing the girl he loved from that same age.

The book moves back and forth in time - the anchor is 2011 as Samuel explores his past.  We then move into his childhood where we see the months leading up to his mother's departure.  At the time he is obsessed with twins, Bishop and Bethany (the girl he loves his whole life).  There are several chapters that explore their lives.  Bishop was abused as a child (which Samuel regrets only figuring out years later) then eventually ends up in the army.  Bethany is a child prodigy on the violin and becomes a famous musician - her relationship with Samuel is off and on.

The book then spends many chapters on the 1968 when Samuel's mother Faye is in college and unwittingly gets caught up in the student protests at the time of the Democratic convention.  Samuel finally discovers the story of why her mother never told him that she even went to college or what transpired there.  We meet her radical friends Alice and Sebastian and see why a police officer with the unlikely name of Charlie Brown held a life long grudge against her.

Eventually we even travel to Norway to see the secrets Samuel's grandfather had buried there and which haunted him and by extension Faye.  In fact the Nix is a Norwegian spirit that Faye learns of as a child and actually seems to provoke panic attacks.

There are also interesting side chapters about Pwange, a video game addict who plays the online games with Samuel.  They show the severe effects on his health which are probably a metaphor for something but really just end up being interesting diversions.

At the end Samuel discovers things about his mother as well as his past that certainly caught me by surprise, yet were believable.

All in all, I really enjoyed the book - but give yourself time to read it.

Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris

While incredibly gripping, this book literally gave me nightmares.  In fact, after the first rough night I considered quitting, but I was just too curious to see how it ended.

Grace is a single woman in her late 30s who has a good job (a fruit buyer for Harrod's) and has been involved in a couple of long time relationships.  But all of the relationships have come to an end because she is responsible for Millie, her 17 year old sister with Down's syndrome.  That is until she meets Jack.  He sweeps her off her feet with his good looks, charm and promises to buy her a perfect home and allow Millie to live with them once she turns 18 and is no longer eligible for the residential school where she currently resides.  He even wins over Grace's parents by jointly taking legal responsibility for Millie so they can fulfil a life long dream of moving to New Zealand.  Within 6 months Grace and Jack marry.

On her wedding night, Jack disappears, but promises to explain everything on their honeymoon in Bangkok.  There she learns he is actually a psychopath who feeds on the fear of others - he takes total control of her life; locking her in the house and never giving her an opportunity to be alone with anyone who could potentially help her escape.  What's worse is she discovers his true intentions toward Millie - it is really her that he wishes to imprison and terrorize.

The book flips back and forth between this start of the relationship and the present - where Grace is living a lie.  To her neighbours and friends she and Jack have a perfect relationship.  However, she is desperately working on a plan to escape.  I was really rooting for Grace and Millie - Jack was just so smug in his belief that he would always be able to outsmart them.  I don't really want to say anything more as it could take away from the suspense.

I did enjoy the book, but only take it on if you think you can cope with reading about extreme emotional abuse.

The Nazi Officer's Wife by Edith Hahn Beer with Susan Dworkin

I'm not sure how I ended up with so many Holocaust books on my reading list right now, but hopefully this is the last for a while (it gets a bit too heavy).  This was a memoir of Edith Hahn who survived the war as a "U-Boat" - a Jewish woman hidden in plain sight in Berlin, living life as the housewife of a Nazi officer.

Edith was born to a well-to-do, very assimilated Jewish family in Vienna.  Her father was a shop owner and her mother was a very talented seamstress.  Before the Nazi invasion of Austria Edith studied law and was active in the Communist movement.  She saw the writing on the wall, but did not leave Austria as she was madly in love with Pepi, a half Jewish man who would not abandon his Christian mother.  Edith's father died before the war and her two sisters managed to escape, one to Palestine the other to Britain.

When the Nazis took over Edith was first forced into the ghetto with her mother then sent to a slave labour camp.  There she suffered immense hardship through starvation and overwork but did manage to survive and even make some friends.  However, shortly after her mother was deported to Poland (until after the war Edith strongly believed it was just for resettlement) Edith was also ordered back to Vienna to report for resettlement.  Instead she took off her yellow star while on the train and immediately became a fugitive.  The reception she received from Pepi and her remaining cousin was far less welcoming than she'd hoped and instead, with the help of kind non-Jewish friends she was given a new identity as Grete Denner and moved to Berlin to work as a nurse with the Red Cross (because they did not demand national identity papers).

While in Berlin at an art gallery she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi party member who fell in love with her and offered to marry her.  Despite her protests and eventual confession of her true identity he still married her and protected her throughout the war.  Werner was a bit of an enigma - he did seem to love her though he feared their baby as he believe the Nazi propaganda that "Jewish blood" would prevail.  He was also a pathological liar and may have somewhat enjoyed the "game" of hiding a Jew.  Due to blindness in one eye he spent most of the war supervising a Nazi paint factory, but at the end was sent to the front and injured and captured by the Russians.  Edith who survived the war and revealed her true identity afterward got a job as a judge in post-war East Berlin and worked tirelessly to obtain his freedom.  When Werner did return he abandoned her and their daughter for his first wife.

A couple of years after the war Edith was asked to spy for the East German government - not wanting to do so she escaped to Britain and lived the rest of her life there and in Israel.  She told her daughter very little about the war years until much later in life when she learned Pepi had kept all her letters which diarized life in the labour camps as well as living underground.  These papers were all donated to the Holocaust museum in Washington.  In addition, the Christian woman whose identity she assumed is recognized as a righteous gentile at Yad Vashem.  Edith did not stay in touch with Werner but did maintain contact with his daughter from his first marriage who had spent time with her as a child during the war.

In all this was an interesting story though I would not say the book was the best written - it was a bit disjointed in style and therefore it was sometimes hard to keep the character references straight.  But it does tell of life of a Jewish person during the war from an entirely different perspective.

Miscalling by Affinity Konar

This was an amazing, though very difficult, story to read.  Konar tells the fictional story of twin sisters who found themselves in Auschwitz and the victims of Mengele's cruel experiments.

Pearl and Stasha are12 years old when they are rounded up in the Lodz Ghetto together with their mother and paternal grandfather, a former respected biology professor.  Their father, a doctor, had disappeared in the ghetto's early days when he went off to treat a sick child and never returned.  The official story was he committed suicide.  After days of suffering in a box car, while their grandfather amused them with biology games, they arrive at Auschwitz.  Spying Mengele's interest in a set of triplets, the girls' mother asks a guard whether it is a good thing to be a multiple.  He affirms that it is and the girls are dragged from beneath their grandfather's coat and handed over to Mengele.

From here we see the horrors of Mengele's experiments from the eyes of his victims as he tortures not only twins, but albinos, little people, and even Jews who he felt looked strangely Aryan and he needed to figure out why.  While we see his cruelty and that of others such as "the Ox" who was in charge of the girls' barracks, Mengele's nurse, Elma and the guard, Taube, we also see those who try to offer small kindnesses in the face of horrors such as the Jewish Dr. Miri who was forced to engage in terrible acts of cruelty and "Twins' father" who was in charge of the boys' barracks and made a point of cataloguing every child that moved in and out of there in an effort to preserve their identities in some small way.  The girls were also able to make some alliances, with Bruna an albino petty criminal who taught them how to steal provisions, Peter, a Mengele favourite who was able to move freely about the camp in his capacity as messenger and "Patient", later known as Feliks who loses his twin early on and becomes both broken and bent on revenge.

When the camp is liberated Stasha and Feliks set out together to avenge the disappearance of their twins.  In their weakened states they believe they can track down and kill Mengele.  And so we follow them as they discover the destruction of Poland following the war and we see how the strength of their spirit allows them to survive even though they cannot achieve their impossible goal.

The book was well written - I loved how it alternated between the perspectives of Pearl and Stasha.  It painted a vivid, though horrific, picture of what happened in Mengele's world as well as the long lasting effects of his torture on his victims who were lucky enough to survive (and at many times I'm sure did not consider themselves the lucky ones).

I highly recommend this book, though be prepared for some lingering horrific pictures in your head.

Before the Fall by Noah Hawley

This is not the type of book I normally read, but it was recommended so I thought I would give it a try.  It was quite interesting except that I found the ending to be a disappointment (I will not reveal it here so as not to spoil the mystery).

A small private plane carrying 11 passengers and crew members takes off from Martha's Vineyard airport for the short flight to Teeterboro, New Jersey.  About 15 minutes after take off the plane mysteriously plunges into the ocean and there are only 2 survivors - Scott Burroughs, an unsuccessful painter who was invited on the plane at the last minute, and TJ, a four year old boy.  Having been a swimmer in high school, Scott carries the boy on his back and miraculously swims them to safety, landing on the coast of Long Island.

After reading about the harrowing rescue, the rest of the book focuses on piecing together why the crash happened.  The framework is the investigation by the authorities:  the NTSB, the FBI (fearing it may have been terrorism), and the Office of Foreign Asset Control (since one passenger was on the eve of being arrested for money laundering).  A more tabloid style investigation is being conducted by Bill Cunningham, the controversial anchor of the new channel operated by the executive whose plane went down (TJ's father).  Bill is trying to suggest Scott is no hero but was having an affair with his boss' wife (which is why he was invited on the plane) and is now after TJ's money.

The chapters all delve into the pasts of the passengers and crew of the plane, searching for causes and motives.  Eventually the black box is recovered and all is revealed, but the answer is somewhat anti-climactic for me.  I think perhaps the most interesting part of the book was how both journalists and law enforcement officials could twist what few facts they had available to suit their interests - and how that's the news that people want to watch.