Frankenstein: a Monstrous Parody by Ludworst Bemonster*

With Halloween coming soon, it’s time to sit down with a cup of hot cider and enjoy this silly, wry take on Ludwig Bemelmans' beloved Madeline books that should make everyone including adults laugh out loud. Author Rick Walton’s use of the pen name Ludworst Bemonster* adds to the fun while Nathan Hale’s childlike illustrations evoke typical preschooler fantasies of what monsters should look like.  

The book opens with these lines: 

In a creepy old castle all covered with spines,
Lived twelve ugly monsters in two crooked lines
In two crooked lines, they bonked their heads,
Pulled out their teeth and wet their beds.

The book goes on to note that:

The ugliest one was Frankenstein.

He scared people out of their socks.

He could even frighten rocks.

This parody will make little boys whoop with laughter.  It’s just “scary” enough for them to love but not so frightening that it’d cause nightmares.  Girls who love Madeline will enjoy it, too, but I’d buy it for boys.

If I were teaching preschool or kindergarten, I’d use this as a story starter and let the kids create their own monster books based on a slew of rhyming favorites I’d set out for them to peruse. I’d also encourage them to make their own crooked lines and walk like their favorite monsters might.

Ages four and up

Summing it Up: Enjoy the Halloween season with this silly, "scary" parody of the Madeline books.  Give it to your favorite preschool or kindergarten-aged boy. 

Rating:  4 stars   

Category: Peanut Butter and Jelly

Publication date: July 17, 2012

Illustrator Web Site (filled with scary fun): http://spacestationnathan.blogspot.com/

What Others are Saying:

Kirkus Reviews: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/rick-walton/frankenstein-walton/

Publishers Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-312-55366-1

The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe

When Will Schwalbe’s mother was dying of pancreatic cancer, he often sat with her during chemo and they talked about books.  They’d always talked about books together but they soon realized that this was different; they’d created their own book club – one with just two members.

Early on, I began wishing I’d known Mary Ann Schwalbe.  What a woman she was: building a library in Afghanistan, serving as the Director of Admissions at Harvard, sharing unique experiences with her grandchildren.  But, wait a minute; I know Mary Ann Schwalbe very well.  Her son made me love this exceptional woman. I sat in on their discussions.  I was there for the setbacks and the celebrations.  At first I was concerned that the cancer diagnosis would mean that this book would be sad and I wasn’t sure I’d want read about this lovely woman’s demise.  I’d been through something quite similar with my own mother and fear gripped me. Thankfully, I was wrong, utterly wrong; this book is a joyful tribute to life, living, the sheer pleasure of reading, and the shared intimacy of sharing what you cherish with someone you love.

What reader wouldn’t delight in a book that celebrates reading and provides so many great titles.  A book that takes the reader through chemotherapy treatments during which she and her son talk about the books they’re reading doesn’t sound like it’d be mesmerizing but it is. When Will Schwalbe asked his mother “What are you reading?” I was part of the conversation.  And when books became a way to introduce topics that concerned them, I was cheering because some of those same books had helped me through similar difficulties. 

My own mother and I loved talking about Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety during my father’s illness and Schwalbe aptly illustrated the manner in which novels can help readers confront tough times. He notes, “The novel gave us a way to discuss some of the things she was facing and some of the things I was facing.  “Do you think he’ll be all right,” I would ask her, referring to Sid, who is very much alone at the end.  “Of course it will be tough on him, but I think he’ll be fine.  I’m quite sure of it. Maybe not right away.  But he’ll be fine,” she would answer, also referring to Sid, but perhaps to my father as well.”

Yet, the Schwalbe conversations weren’t just about dying, they also shared happy stories.  About Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, “How could anyone who loves books not love a book that is itself so in love with books?”  Their enjoyment of this and books like The Elegance of the Hedgehog,  People of the Book,  A Prayer for Owen Meany, Olive KItteridge, Suite Française, and AThousand Splendid Suns made this voracious reader thrill to the fact that they also valued books that I adored.  That made me eager to try the books they read that I hadn’t and thus a bonus of this marvel is that I now look forward to reading Too Much Happiness, Felicia’s Journey, The Bite of the Mango and several others.

The book includes part of Mary Ann Schwalbe’s obituary by Marina Vaizey:  “This dynamo of energy was contained in a small, quiet, smiling, elegantly dressed woman, who could appear as conventional as a lady who lunched, but traveled the world often in desperately trying circumstances: she was an electoral observer in the Balkans, and was shot at in Afghanistan.  Mary Anne saw the worst and believed the best.”

This book is a paean to Carpe diem.  As Schwalbe wrote, “I was learning that when you’re with someone who is dying you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.”

Will Schwalbe’s tribute to his mother and to the power of reading is a book for every book lover.  It’s also the perfect gift for anyone in a book club.  I initially thought the title mawkish but then Schwalbe reminded me, “We’re all in the end-of-our life book clubs, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last selection; each conversation the final one.”  Carpe diem, indeed.

Summing it Up: Buy this book for everyone on your holiday list.  Immerse yourself in the life of an exceptional woman.  Discover a list of enticing new titles.  The End of Your Life Book Club is an ebullient tribute to the power of the written word.

Rating:  5 Stars

Category: Grandma’s Pot Roast, Five Stars, Nonfiction, Super Nutrition, Book Club

Publication Date:  October 2, 2012

Reading Group Guide: http://www.scribd.com/doc/103073577/The-End-of-Your-Life-Book-Club-by-Will-Schwalbe-Reading-Group-Guide

What Others are Saying:

Kirkus Reviews: http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/will-schwalbe/end-life-book-club/#review

Publishers Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-307-59403-7

Wall Street Journal Interview: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/09/28/the-last-books-youll-ever-read/

The Lighthouse Road by Peter Geye

The Lighthouse Road debuts this week but I've already read it three times, each one bringing fresh revelations and reminding me of why I love to read. It begins in an 1896 snowstorm as Thea Eide delivers her son.  She, a recent immigrant with no close family, dies soon after and the entire small Minnesota town of Gunflint raises her son Odd.

“From the first days of his life, Odd had been the whole town’s ward.   All his sweaters were hand-knit by fisherman’s wives; his haircuts given under a bowl by the innkeeper’s wife; the men took him hunting and handed down their own son’s outgrown boots and shotguns; Christmas morning always found twenty gifts intended for Odd on the apothecary doorstep.  The godly wives took him to church on Sunday mornings, and the schoolteacher stayed after class to help him with his lessons.”

Hosea Grimm took Thea in, delivered Odd and helped many in Gunflint. Now Odd lives with Hosea and his ward Rebekah at the apothecary where Grimm serves as town doctor and impresario of activities good and evil.

“The Shivering Timber was an unabashed brothel and whiskey parlor that had evaded the reach of the pious Gunflinters and constables by catering to their weird and secret proclivities. It housed a dozen or so prostitutes and was guarded by two woodsmen brothers from Wisconsin on Grimm’s payroll. . . Hosea had a forty percent stake in the place. He also kept the girls in calomel and morphine, gave them abortions, and pulled their rotten teeth.  And he supplied the whiskey.  So he had a king’s reign.”

When a town or a people are beholden, they often ignore evil and as Odd grows and the book moves between the years before his birth to his adulthood, the novel shows the consequences of living in such a blind-eyed society.  As Odd notes: “The blind eye was a bad disease in this town.”

Historical fiction aficionados will relish the picture perfect portrayals of life in the 1890s lumber camp where Thea cooks and acclimates herself to America as temperatures dip to forty below. Geye evokes the cold and camp life with a particular affinity as in “The moon hung gibbous and low, casting the snow in the gorge in bronze light.”  And of the mess hall where “The jacks returned for lunch and for dinner with frosted coats, their faces hoary as ash, wraithlike.  As their coats melted in the mess halls heat, they appeared to be vaporizing.”

As Odd grows, he hauls bootleg liquor for Hosea in his small skiff in an electrical storm, encounters a bear in its den and fights for what he wants. Geye’s portrayal of Odd’s journey toward manhood and of the lumber camp where Thea cooks evokes writers like Per Petterson and Annie Proulx as well as the classic Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton.

But like such great writers, Geye doesn't just pen precise sentences, he also steers the plot into uncertain waters revealing young Odd’s secret love of Rebekah and Thea’s harrowing story.  This reviewer will not reveal all the memorable plot twists that make the book a thrilling page turner because every reader should be afforded the joy of encountering these as Geye presents them.

Having tagged at least a dozen passages as essential to quote in this review, I’ll end with just one more section to whet your appetite:

“In mid-March, along the river’s frozen waters, two thirteen-year-old boys shattered the glaze on a knee-deep and moon-shaped snow.  They wore snowshoes they’d made of bent ash and moose gut.  Their hats were beaver fur, trapped and skinned and finally sewn while they sat around the fire in the wigwam.  

Odd and Danny Riverfish. They wore bowie knives on their belts and carried shotguns over their shoulders and they dragged a toboggan behind them.”. . .

The boys had skipped school and Odd asked Danny if their teacher would miss them:

“Miss Huff could make a forest fire boring. Besides I don’t plan on ever going to that schoolhouse again. . . Arithmetic never got a beaver tail to fry up, did it?”

“Or a pelt to sell,” Odd said, then fell silent for a moment before he added, “She tells Hosea I’m truant and I’ll get the belt.”

“Someday you’ll be doing the belting.”

“I’ll never be able to whomp Hosea.”

“Sure you will, Someday we’ll whomp him together, steal his money.”

The mere thought of this made Odd despair. His feelings about Hosea were as complicated as his own true history.

Read this book and allow yourself to sink into the exciting yet complicated lives of a group of sure-to-be-classic characters.  Buy it for everyone you know.

Summing it Up:  Read this for the story of a young man’s survival in a small town in turn-of-the-century Minnesota.  Devour its depiction of immigrant ships, lumber camps, towns with secrets and cities where the young try to start afresh and of fierce love that will not quit.  Choose it for your book club as you’ll want to talk about the ending the minute you finish reading.

Rating: 5 stars   

Category: Gourmet, Historical Fiction, Book Club

Publication date: October 2, 2012

Author’s website: http://petergeye.com

Reading Group Guide: http://unbridledbooks.com/images/uploads/pdfs/LighthouseRoad_RG.pdf

What Others are Saying:

Booklist: http://www.booklistonline.com/The-Lighthouse-Road-Peter-Geye/pid=5519666

Library Journal: http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2012/09/books/fiction/fiction-reviews-september-15-2012/

Rain Taxi: http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2012winter/geye.php

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

The Round House is the story of Joe, a thirteen-year-old boy, who tries to understand why his mother, Geraldine, was brutally attacked because he wants to help his family become whole again. Louise Erdrich weaves three unique sagas in The Round House and each is a masterpiece.  First, there’s a suspenseful tale of the rape and attempted murder that makes the reader flip the pages to find out whodunit and if he’ll get his just desserts.  Second, is the humorous, satirical, coming-of-age story of Joe, a character as original and engaging as Arnold Spirit in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  And lastly there’s Erdrich’s gold standard, exquisitely picture-perfect view of life on a North Dakota reservation complete with heartache, injustice, and a solid sense of community all told with a vibrato resonance.

“You can’t tell if a person is an Indian from a set of fingerprints. You can’t tell from a name. You can’t even tell from a local police report.  You can’t tell from a picture.  From a mug shot.  From a phone number. From the government’s point of view, the only way you can tell an Indian is an Indian is to look at that person’s history.  There must be ancestors from way back who signed some document or were recorded as Indians by the U. S. government, someone identified as a member of a tribe.  And then after that you have to look at that person’s blood quantum, how much Indian blood they’ve got that belongs to one tribe.  In most cases, the government will call the person an Indian if their blood is one quarter – it usually has to be from one tribe.  But that tribe has also got to be federally recognized.  In other words, being an Indian is in some ways a tangle of red tape.

On the other hand, Indians know other Indians without the need for a federal pedigree, and this knowledge, like love, sex, or having or not having a baby – has nothing to do with government. “

Why, why, why did someone rape and attempt to murder Geraldine Coutts?   She’s a good woman, a kind and loving wife and mother and a respected member of her community.  

“My mother’s job was to know everybody’s secrets.  The original census rolls taken in the area that became our reservation go back past 1879 and include a description of each family by tribe, often by clan, by occupation, by relationship, age, and original name in our language.  . .  It was my mother’s task to parse the ever more complicated branching and interbranching tangle of each bloodline.  Through the generations, we have become an impenetrable undergrowth of names and liaisons. At the tip of each branch of course the children are found, those newly enrolled by their parents, or often a single mother or father, with a named parent on the blank whose identity if known might shake the branches of the other trees. Children of incest, molestation, rape, adultery, fornification beyond reservation boundaries or within, children of white farmers, bankers, nuns, BIA superintendents, police and priests. My mother kept her files locked in a safe. . .”

If Geraldine was attacked for the secrets she knew, what will happen if those secrets are unearthed?  Joe and his father, Bazil, a tribal judge, try to find out the attacker’s identity so he can be brought to justice. Joe’s antics with his good friends, his relationship with his bawdy aunt and elders, and his encounters with Father Travis, the local priest, offer comic relief thus allowing the serious themes of identity, greed, racism and injustice to infuse the reader.  In the hands of a less skilled writer, the story might have seemed maudlin or melodramatic, but Erdrich makes each page an adventure. 

This is a more accessible book than many in Erdrich’s oeuvre and it should thus appeal to older teens as well as fans of works like The Master Butcher’s Singing Club. It’s a stand-alone novel and is the second in a planned trilogy that began with A Plague of Doves.

Summing it Up: Read this for a rip-roaring good story. Relish it for its delightfully inventive, yet completely realistic characters.  Remember it for the lessons it imparts on justice, healing and overcoming evil. Savor it for the way it mimics classics like To Kill a Mockingbird in presenting hard truths in a palatable and engaging format. Select it for your next book club discussion. 

Rating: 5 stars   

Category: Gourmet, Grandma's Pot Roast, Super Nutrition, Book Club

Publication date: October 2, 2012

What Others are Saying: 

Book List: http://www.booklistonline.com/The-Round-House-Louise-Erdrich/pid=5563486

Kirkus Reviews: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/louise-erdrich/round-house/#review

Publishers Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-06-206524-7

U S A Today: http://books.usatoday.com/book/round-house-delivers-justice-and-redemption/r847989

Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/louise-erdrichs-the-round-house-proves-a-moving-novel-about-youth-maturity-and-family/2012/10/02/26e19cd2-0676-11e2-afff-d6c7f20a83bf_story.html

Shine, Shine, Shine by Lydia Netzer

Last week in a cooking class, I ate my first bite of raw tomatillo.  It tasted fresh, acidic, and nothing like what I’d expected. So it was when I read Lydia Netzer’s Shine, Shine, Shine, a novel so fresh and filled with quirky, endearing characters that I felt I’d been dropped behind the closed curtains of a mansion where nothing was as it seemed.  Netzer’s debut invites comparisons to novels by Tom Perotta and Anne Tyler with its laugh-out-loud dialogue and subtle glimpses of people we see every day yet never really know.

Sunny is pregnant and married to Nobel Prize-winning robotics scientist/astronaut Maxon Mann. They have a four-year-old autistic son, Bubber, and Sunny’s mother is dying as Maxon is floating in space when “Shine Shine Shine” opens with these words.  “This is a story of an astronaut who was lost in space and the wife he left behind.  Or is this the story of a brave man who survived the wreck of the first rocket sent into space with the intent to colonize the moon.  This is the story of the human race, who pushed one crazy little splinter of metal and a few pulsing cells up into the vast dark reaches of the universe, in the hope that the splinter would hit something and stick, and that the little pulsing cells could somehow survive.”   Actually Netzer’s delightful debut is all of the above and much more.  It’s a tale of love, regret, acceptance, forgiveness and it’s a novel that will make readers think about what it means to be normal and real.

Sunny isn’t the typical neighborhood wife as is literally revealed when an auto accident causes her to lose the wig she always wears.  Sunny has alopecia; she has no hair – no eyelashes, no brows.  To appear normal, Sunny carefully applies false eyelashes and wears wigs so no one in their upper class neighborhood knows until the accident that she’s not what she seems.  With her mother dying, her husband stuck in space in a disabled rocket and her son’s preschool suggesting that Bubber needs additional help, Sunny decides to “come clean,” to appear as she was born and perhaps to make changes in her life that will allow nature to take its course.

The novel explores Sunny and Maxon’s childhood beginnings and the part Sunny’s mother Emma played in teaching Maxon to act normal.  Emma gave Maxon scripts that he translated into equations and proofs to determine how to behave.  As an adult, Maxon’s success has come through building robots that emulate human behavior.  And with Maxon’s success came Sunny’s desire to make them seem more normal and her shunning of anything that might make their lives more difficult.

When friends asked how her mother was, she said, “Fine, totally fine.  You can almost see her getting better, every single day.”  

“But I thought she was on life support,” said her friend Jenny.

“Yes, and it’s working” she told them.

Sunny also worries about the new baby and Bubber, with the medicine he was able to pass for a regular kid, sometimes. The baby inside her stretched and turned, uncertain whether it would be autistic or not. Whether it would be more like Maxon or more like Sunny.  Whether it would fit into the neighborhood.

Maxon challenged Sunny, “Stop trying to change him. Why can’t you just love him exactly the way he is?”  

“I do love him,” . . . I love him so much that I want something better for him, something better than what we had.  Everything about us is so complicated. I just want to save him from that. Let it be simple.  Let it be obvious.

Netzer’s novel makes the reader question whether our fears of seeming different, our desires to conform aren’t the undoing of our abilities to be exceptional.  When Sunny apologizes for Bubber’s behavior at a NASA facility, a senior staff member tells her:

“Asperger’s – You might say it kind of runs in the family.  The NASA family.”

Shine, Shine, Shine is a novel for our times. We’re all odd balls – bald in some way. We cover up and try to seem normal. Yet, we too may find that when we reveal our “baldness” that we’ll become more human, more real.

Summing it Up: Shine, shine, shine is exactly what this novel does.  Had Vonnegut written The Velveteen Rabbit, it might have resembled this take on astronauts, autism, alopecia, and what it means to be real.

Rating: 5 stars   

Category: Sushi, Book Club

Publication date: July 17, 2012

Author’s blog: http://lydianetzer.blogspot.com/

Reading Group Guide: http://media.us.macmillan.com/rggguides/9781250007070RGG.pdf

What Others are Saying:

BookPage: http://bookpage.com/review/shine-shine-shine/i-robot

Kirkus Reviews: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/lydia-netzer/shine-shine-shine/#review

Library Journal: http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2012/07/books/fiction/xpress-reviews-fiction-first-look-at-new-books-july-6-2012/

New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/books/shine-shine-shine-a-novel-by-lydia-netzer.html

The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian

Nineteen-fifteen is the year of the Slaughter You Know Nothing About.  The anniversary of its commencement – is nearing.  If you are not Armenian, you probably know little about the deportations and massacres: the death of a million and a half civilians. That’s the simple way Laura Petrosian, a central character in Chris Bohjalian’s new novel, introduces the theme of this informative and evocative story.  Laura, a popular novelist, is by her own admission “obsessed and unstoppable” in her quest to know the details of her grandparents’ lives during the 1915 Armenian genocide. And so the novel itself begins with Elizabeth Endicott’s arrival in Allepo, Syria after her recent graduation from Mount Holyoke.  She’s part of a Boston Friends of Armenia group there to bring food and supplies to what our grandparents called “the starving Armenians.”  She soon meets Armen, an engineer, who’s lost his wife and baby and who soon joins the British Army to fight the Turks. Armen and Elizabeth correspond and fall in love and the novel veers to the present day when Laura Petrosian begins to learn of her grandparents’ past.

Elizabeth and Armen are complex characters whose lives make this little known time seem real and who make the reader realize that what happened in Armenia in 1915 is essential to our understanding of Turkey and the Middle East today. Mr. Bohjalian, himself an American novelist of Armenian descent, infuses this novel with a realism and heartfelt resonance informed and impassioned by his own connection and the stories he’s undoubtedly heard since childhood.

When Laura ponders, “my brother thinks trying to chronicle our grandparents’ story is a spectacular waste of literary capital and can only inflame tensions between Turks and Armenians. . . Everyone would be better off . . . if I just wrote another domestic comedy” the reader wonders if Bohjalian had such questioners.  And he deftly answers the query with, “But history does matter.  There is a line between the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Serbs and the Rwandans.  There are obviously more, but really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?  You get the point”.  And we do get the point because Bohjalian makes us care deeply about Armen and Elizabeth and a girl named Hatoun.

The novel helps us understand how the term “Young Turks” came into our vernacular as it was three young Turks led by Talet Pasha who initiated and staged the genocide and who were found guilty by a Turkish court of “the massacre and destruction of the Armenians.” That history is informative but Bohjalian takes it a step further by having Laura’s research find that “If you visit Ankara or Istanbul today, you will find streets and schools named for Talat Pasha” (and the other young Turks). “the nation that found Talat Pasha guilty of attempting to wipe out a race of people later named concourses after him.  How is that possible?  Because, to much of the nation – though, thankfully, not all – that genocide in the desert never happened.  Even now, labeling the slaughter of 1915 “genocide” can land a Turkish citizen in jail and get a Turkish Armenian journalist killed.”

I believe and hope that Bohjalian’s naming of the courageous and kind Turkish private Orhan in the book was homage to Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish author, who was arrested for stating the facts of the genocide.

Summing it Up: This epic, historical love story begs for discussion. Upon finishing it, readers will want to find others to talk with about Laura and Armen’s love, about Nevart, Hatoun, Dr. Akham and the other minor characters whose lives make this novel cinematic in scope and about what we should do to make sure this atrocity is never forgotten.  It also contains unexpected twists that book clubs will love to debate.

Footnote: I spoke with Mr. Bohjalian today when he appeared at a luncheon in Harbor Springs and he confirmed that the kind Turkish pirate Orhan is in fact named in tribute to author Orhan Pamuk.  If you have a chance visit the author website for upcoming appearances throughout the U. S. Bohjalian's presentation is fascinating and includes many photographs of sites in Lebanon and Turkey that he visited in the last year. 

Rating: 5 stars   

Category: Grandma’s Pot Roast, Historical Fiction, Super Nutrition, Book Club

Publication date: July 17, 2012

Author website: http://www.chrisbohjalian.com/the_sandcastle_girls

Reading Group Guide: http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides_s/the_sandcastle_girls1.asp

The Story Behind the Story: http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/05/02/the-kernel-that-led-to-the-sandcastle-girls/

What Others are Saying:

A Compilation: : http://news.am/eng/news/113235.html

Kirkus Reviews: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/chris-bohjalian/sandcastle-girls/#review  (Beware, this review contains spoilers even at the beginning.)

Library Journal: http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2012/06/books/fiction/fiction-reviews-7/

Publishers Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-385-53479-6

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

Readers, buy this book! Make a bookmark with the words: THIS IS NON FICTION in large letters and keep it as a reminder because you'll swear this is a novel.  Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Katherine Boo has brilliantly succeeded in making the story of "life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity" radiate with energy and emotion.  How a non-fiction writer could develop characters and capture dialogue while staying true to facts that illuminate the story of Annawadi, a self-developed slum of 3,000 people living on half an acre on the outskirts of the Mumbai airport, is a testament to Boo’s ability to embed herself, listen and then etch an indelible picture that makes the reader know, yes, really know, those residents. After more than three years of research with translators beside her, all of whom had constant fevers and infections from the filthy conditions, Boo captures the heart of the community.  She paints each resident with a palette that shows many transcending their surroundings.

Abdul, a Muslim teen, is trying to get his family out of the slum through his ability to find and resell recyclables and by his adherence to his motto:  avoid trouble.  But, in Annawadi, trouble comes unbidden when Fatima, the foul-mouthed, one-legged harridan, accuses Abdul of a crime he didn’t commit.

Asha, who’s turning forty, dreams of becoming Annawadi’s first female slum lord and gains success as an influence peddler.  Her daughter Manju is about to become the area’s first female college graduate if her other duties and a possible arranged marriage don’t derail it.  Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap metal thief, is a joyful mischief maker.  Boo makes the reader value Annawadi’s residents while they see daily reminders that they are of no worth to others. In a place where teens debate the best suicide methods and see death daily, Kalu’s friend Sunil, climbs to a roof top where “something he’s come to realize . . . looking out, thinking about what would happen if he leaned too far, was that a boy’s life could still matter to himself.”

Boo reports the residents’ thoughts as in Abdul’s pondering: “Water and ice were made of the same thing.  He thought most people were made of the same thing too. But here was the interesting thing. Ice was distinct from – and in his view, better than – what it was made of.  He wanted to be better than what he was made of.  In Mumbai’s dirty water, he wanted to be ice.”

Whatever you’ve read or thought about India today, this book will turn it upside down.  It will sadden you and it will make your heart sing with hope.  Most of all it will make you thankful that there are writers with Boo’s talent and tenacity who are willing to sacrifice to show the real Mumbai. Out of filth, Katherine Boo has created a magnificent ice sculpture of a book.

When Kirkus Reviews, arguably the toughest book critics in the business, call a book: “The best book yet written on India in the throes of a brutal transition,” you know you’re in good hands.

Rating: 5 stars   

Category: Nonfiction, Gourmet, Super Nutrition, Book Club

Publication date: February 7, 2012

Author website: http://www.behindthebeautifulforevers.com/

Reading Group Guide: http://www.behindthebeautifulforevers.com/discussion-guide/

Interview: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/9295694/Katherine-Boo-interview.html

What Others are Saying:

Boston Globe: http://articles.boston.com/2012-02-05/books/31023966_1_slum-dwellers-mumbai

The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/29/behind-beautiful-forevers-katherine-boo-review

Kirkus Reviews: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/katherine-boo/behind-beautiful-forevers/#review

New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/books/katherine-boos-first-book-behind-the-beautiful-forevers.html?_r=1

Publishers Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-4000-6755-8