A Tale of the Heart

Kate Morgenroth's new novel, Through the Heart, is a very different kind of love story. Or perhaps a very different kind of mystery. We witness the burgeoning romance between Timothy and Nora and their interactions with family and friends, knowing from the beginning that this story does not have a truly happy ending. We know that a murder will take place; we know when and where; but we don't have a clue whodunnit or who the unlucky victim is. The author does a great job of building interest in the relationship (you'll be rooting for Nora I think) and building suspense toward the awful climax (you'll be thinking, oh I hope the victim isn't this person or that person, or I hope so-and-so gets their due). Have fun with it, try to guess the ending, or just enjoy the ride. Morgenroth is one to watch.

Envisioning a Different World

It is obvious that novelist Laura Kasischke is also a poet. The writing in her new novel, In a Perfect World, is simply luminous. Here's the story: Jiselle, a beautiful, 30something flight attendant who has never married, is courted by handsome pilot Mark Dorn. After a brief and magical romance, with travel to numerous exotic locales, they wed. Jiselle leaves her career to stay home with Mark's three children. This is a sticky situation to be in under normal circumstances--teenage girls and a young boy still mourning their mother and resentful of the newcomer in their lives. But to make matters even more difficult, a flu pandemic spreads across the world, isolating Jiselle and the children in their community, while Mark is held in quarantine across the ocean. This story is a wonderful blending of an apocalyptic sort of plot, and a good character novel that really looks at how these people deal with each other and with the multiple crises affecting them. In the end, Jiselle and her stepchildren rise to the occasion and become a new and much stronger family, with a few surprises along the way.

Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel's newest novel blends fact and fiction to tell the story of Henry the VIII's challenge to the church's power, when he was determined to make Anne Boleyn his queen. It is told from the eyes of Thomas Cromwell who rose from the gutter to become Henry's right hand man, taking the place of Cardinal Wolsey from whom he learned the tricks of his trade.
Cromwell changed the course of history by backing Henry's quest for Anne Boleyn and Henry's desire for absolute authority (which all kings and queens since, including Queen Elizabeth II subscribe to. He was a covert Protestant who protected other militant Protestants from Thomas More. His main goal was to help the common people which he thought could be achieved by destroying the Catholic clergy whom he despised and he wanted more limits on the power of the aristocracy, who despised him. He was also an administrative genius who transformed England from a fiefdom to a nation-state.
Mantel is able to bring all of these themes together by making us privy to Cromwell's every thought and calculation. Wolf Hall is the seat of the Seymour family clan where the goings-on symbolizes what Cromwell despised about the Catholic church.

The Sixties in the South

The Help takes readers back to the burgeoning civil rights era in Mississippi. It's hard to believe that this is the author's debut novel. It's a wonderful story full of women characters who are drawn so believably that you just cannot accept that they are fictional. Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss to find that her family's maid, Constantine, has disappeared. No one will tell her what happened. Like many well-to-do families in the South, the black maid spent more time raising the children than the parents did, and Skeeter feels a terrible loss in Constantine's absence. She starts to pay more attention to the black maids of her friends and begins seeing the world through their eyes as she tries to find out what happened to Constantine. Gradually she comes to see that the world she inhabits holds some terrible secrets and many injustices. She decides to interview black maids and write a book about their lives. It is a dangerous undertaking in 1962 Mississippi, especially for the black women she talks to, but they bravely decide that their stories need to be told. This is a poignant, fascinating book about this period in history. It does exactly what a great book should do: make you think, see, and feel like someone else entirely outside your own skin.

Debra Dean's debut novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad, takes readers back to a dark part of the world's history, World War II. Although many novels have focused on this pivotal moment in history, not so many have been written from the Russian citizens' point of view. Set during the siege of Leningrad, in which the residents were completely cut off from food and medical supplies and military assistance, The Madonnas of Leningrad focuses on the plight of the workers at the Hermitage Museum and their families. The main character, Marina, was a tour guide in the museum, and her memories of the Madonnas and other beautiful works of art that used to hang in the Hermitage and have been sent away for safekeeping help to keep her sane during the months of deprivation, fear, and sorrow. The families have been invited to stay in the basement of the museum for safety from bombing and looting, and Marina spends much of her time trying to look out for bombers, bailing out flooded areas, and other assigned tasks. With the rest of her time, she walks through the many rooms of the museum, remembering what was there and describing it in detail to herself. Her memory saves her. Ironically, in the present time, her memory is deserting her as she succumbs to the symptoms of Alzheimers. The novel moves from past to present effortlessly, as we see the world through Marina's eyes and learn about the power of memory and of a rich inner life, even during times of physical and mental decline.