In the late 1800s, the semi-frozen Canadian territory north of Sault Ste. Marie is no place to go wandering around with winter coming on. Lakes and bogs are half frozen traps, snow storms obliterate trails and disorient travelers, and wolves are on the prowl. But after a Scottish pioneer woman finds her trapper neighbor murdered in his cabin and her teen age son goes missing, she and a hodgepodge of others set of in various groups to solve – or cover up – the mystery.

There are several possible motives for the murder, everyone is a suspect, and side stories interweave themselves into the main tale. But there are deeper levels to the book than simply solving a mystery. As the characters track each other through the cold, bleak landscape, they ultimately find their own life paths.

Stef Penney won the 2006 Costa Book of the Year Award for The Tenderness of Wolves. Part mystery, part adventure this is a smoothly written, complicated story that is sure to please readers looking for lots of plot but who want meat on the bones.

Also posted on Rose City Reader.

How can I review a book that took me 30 years to read? This is not just a book, it is part of my life. I have been working on The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway longer than all my formal education, two marriages, and my law practice.

But I can’t review Hemingway, especially when my attitudes about his writing have changed over the decades. I was unquestionably awed as a teenager, snide as a college English major, a genuine fan as an adult, and now just a little weary.

His writing is masterful. He was a genius with spare dialog and creating reality with only a few brush strokes. (Of course, because he taught Americans a new way of writing, reading the original does not pack the wallop it must have before everyone copied him.) What wore me out was the subject matter – the bull fights and the Spanish Civil War in particular. It just got to be a chore for me to get to the end.

Longer version posted on Rose City Reader.

Grounded in outmoded attitudes about class and distractingly highlighted by outmoded attitudes about race, Alice Adams has not aged well. In his 1922 Pulitzer winner, Booth Tarkington presents a heroine striving to climb the short social ladder of her Midwestern city using only her charms and well-rehearsed mannerisms.

Watching Alice struggle is painful. She has self-awareness sufficient to know she is doing things wrong, but lacks the tools to do them right. And it never seems that the game is worth the candle.

Finally, after watching Alice dither for most of the book, circumstances force her to face reality and make some difficult but intelligent decisions. The book ends on a gloriously hopeful note, which is the most redeeming feature of the story.

Also posted on Rose City Reader.

Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China is still the definitive work on the subject, in continuous print since the Cambridge University Press published the first introductory volume in 1954. In The Man Who Loved China, Simon Winchester turns his inquisitive eye and keen wit to Needham’s life and accomplishments, wrapping personality, history, politics, and science into the kind of irresistible story only Winchester can produce.

Read the rest of the review on Rose City Reader.

Mark Helprin’s rollicking novel, Freddy and Fredericka, follows the adventures of the Prince and Princess of Wales as, plagued by scandals that threaten the continuity of the royal throne, they set off on a quest to recapture the American Colonies. The two – clearly modeled on Charles and Diane – learn to love and appreciate each other while they both grow into their crowns.

Full review posted on Rose City Reader.

Sarah Stonich’s sophomore novel, The Ice Chorus, is one of those rare books in which all the parts come together seamlessly. The ideas, plot, characters, and images all work to entertain the reader with the rich story of Liselle’s life-changing romance with Charlie, an artist she met in Mexico.

Liselle, living in a nondescript Irish fishing town, films and interviews her new neighbors for a nascent documentary about love, waits for her artist lover to return, and mulls over her affair with Charlie, her marriage, and her tragic relationship with her father. It is a romantic story that looks beyond mere romance to examine the way passionate love affects every part of life, including where people live and the direction of their careers.

Also posted on Rose City Reader.

Before there was a Food Network, Iron Chef, or even a Martha Stewart magazine, there was The Silver Palate. Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins may not be classical chefs, and they did not revolutionize restaurant cooking like Alice Waters or Thomas Keller, but they did more to change the way Americans cooked in their homes than anyone since Julia Child first trussed a chicken on t.v.

Full review posted on Rose City Reader.

Paul Newman referred collectively to his acting roles as “the child of our time.” Shawn Levy puts it this way in his new biography, Paul Newman: A Life:

Taken as a whole, Newman’s body of work nicely encapsulated the history of an in-between generation of American men who helped their fathers and uncles conquer the world in war and commerce but who could only watch—likely with some jealousy—as their younger siblings and their own children acted out on the native rebellious impulse to overturn everything. . . . Torn by the conflicting impulses to rule and rebel, his was arguably the pivotal generation of the twentieth century, and Newman, almost unconsciously, was its actor laureate.

It is this “big picture” approach that gives depth to Levy’s book and holds the attention of readers not usually taken with celebrity biographies. Levy examines Newman’s life as a whole and in connection with cultural changes.

Levy gathered every Newman interview that he could get his hands on, in print or on camera, and studied them in chronological order. He used these interviews—Newman’s own words—for the core of the biography. While his method did not allow Levy to plow new ground, he wrings a lot out of his material. Readers who know Newman’s movies, but have only a passing interest in other details of his life, will learn a great deal about an interesting man. Dedicated Newman fans and celebrity gossip aficionados will likely know the basic story, but should find plenty of details to savor.

Full review posted on the Internet Review of Books and Rose City Reader.

Kate Atkinson won the 1995 Whitbread (Costa) Book of the Year Award for her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, before going on to write six more books, so far, including the popular Jackson Brodie mystery series.

In Museum, the precocious narrator Ruby Lenox takes us behind the scenes of the museum of her family history, starting with the very moment of her conception. Interleaved between the chapters of Ruby’s biography are lengthy “footnotes” that provide the story of earlier generations, back to Ruby’s great-grandmother.

This is a book about parents, children, sisters, love, marriage, infidelity, war, death, pets and the general hodgepodge of family life. Ruby is a beguilingly effervescent narrator, finding humor in the darkest cubbyholes of her family’s past and, eventually, finding her own place in the family gallery.

Also posted on Rose City Reader

Julie Powell took a clever idea born of personal desperation and used it to catapult into a new career as an author. Stuck in her dead-end temp job as a government secretary, and panicking over turning 30, Powell got the harebrained idea to cook all the recipes in Julia Child’s most famous cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (volume one, at least), in one year. Her stroke of genius luck was to take her husband’s idea and log her daily progress on a blog she called the Julie/Julia Project, thus eventually earning her a book deal for Julie & Julia, a movie deal, and the enmity of hundreds of envious bloggers typing away in obscurity.

Unfortunately, the idea was better than the execution . . .

Read the full review on Rose City Reader