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| Happy Citizenship Day! A youngster rests after joining other local children who attended a naturalization ceremony in Los Angeles on Sept. 19, 2012. Some 40 million Americans — about one in eight — are foreign-born. (Getty Images/Kevork Djansezian) |
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| The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
If you've ever wondered what your dog is
thinking, Stein's third novel offers an answer. Enzo is a lab terrier mix
plucked from a farm outside Seattle to ride shotgun with race car driver Denny
Swift as he pursues success on the track and off. Denny meets and marries Eve,
has a daughter, Zoë, and risks his savings and his life to make it on the
professional racing circuit. Enzo, frustrated by his inability to speak and his
lack of opposable thumbs, watches Denny's old racing videos, coins koanlike
aphorisms that apply to both driving and life, and hopes for the day when his
life as a dog will be over and he can be reborn a man. When Denny hits an
extended rough patch, Enzo remains his most steadfast if silent supporter. Enzo
is a reliable companion and a likable enough narrator, though the string of
Denny's bad luck stories strains believability. Much like Denny, however, Stein
is able to salvage some dignity from the over-the-top drama. Review
from Amazon
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| Half Broke Horses: A True Life Novel by Jeannette Walls
For the first 10 years of her life, Lily Casey
Smith, the narrator of this true-life novel by her granddaughter, Walls, lived
in a dirt dugout in west Texas. Walls, whose mega-selling memoir, The Glass
Castle, recalled her own upbringing, writes in what she recalls as Lily's
plainspoken voice, whose recital provides plenty of drama and suspense as she
ricochets from one challenge to another. Having been educated in fits and
starts because of her parents' penury, Lily becomes a teacher at age 15 in a
remote frontier town she reaches after a solo 28-day ride. Marriage to a
bigamist almost saps her spirit, but later she weds a rancher with whom she
shares two children and a strain of plucky resilience. (They sell bootleg
liquor during Prohibition, hiding the bottles under a baby's crib.) Lily is a
spirited heroine, fiercely outspoken against hypocrisy and prejudice, a rodeo
rider and fearless breaker of horses, and a ruthless poker player. Assailed by
flash floods, tornados and droughts, Lily never gets far from hardscrabble
drudgery in several states—New Mexico, Arizona, Illinois—but hers is one of
those heartwarming stories about indomitable women that will always find an
audience. Review from Amazon
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| Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
"I
was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of
January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near
Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name
as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license...records my
first name simply as Cal."
So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations
of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village
overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing
its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move
out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To
understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty
family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal,
one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction.
Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the
American epic.
Middlesex
is the
winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Review from Amazon
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| Shanghai Girls by Lisa See
In 1937 Shanghai—the Paris of Asia—twenty-one-year-old
Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives.
Both are beautiful, modern, and carefree—until the day their father tells them
that he has gambled away their wealth. To repay his debts, he must sell the
girls as wives to suitors who have traveled from Los Angeles to find Chinese
brides. As Japanese bombs fall on their beloved city, Pearl and May set out on
the journey of a lifetime, from the Chinese countryside to the shores of
America. Though inseparable best friends, the sisters also harbor petty
jealousies and rivalries. Along the way they make terrible sacrifices, face
impossible choices, and confront a devastating, life-changing secret, but
through it all the two heroines of this astounding new novel hold fast to who
they are—Shanghai girls. Review from Amazon
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