DCL Book Chat

As with her fantastic debut novel, The Tenderness of Wolves, Penney’s second book, The Invisible Ones, can be categorized as a mystery, but it is really a story of human drama that just happens to have a dead body and a missing person in it.

When the story opens, Private Investigator Ray Lovell opens his eyes in a hospital bed to find that he’s temporarily paralyzed and has no memory of how he got there. He’s currently investigating a missing person; a young Romany, or English Gypsy, and has been in contact with many of her family members. Turns out Ray is half Romany himself, allowing him access to a culture that even in 1980’s England is still wary of outsiders and considered second-class by main-stream society. As the story unfolds we get to know the members of this complicated and troubled family as told through Ray’s investigating and through the eyes of the youngest family member, J.J.

Both Ray and J.J. are winning characters who are trying to fit into a seemingly ever-changing world that has hit them with some hard knocks. Even though Ray suspects foul play he can’t nail down the details and he occasionally gets in his own way. J.J. begins to realize that his protected little slice of life might be susceptible to caving in.

Beautifully paced and with several surprises at the end, Penney has created another stunning novel.

Laura J.

The idea of time travel seems to be endlessly intriguing.  From Einstein to Madeline l’Engle to Audrey Niffenegger to Ursula Le Guin to The Terminator, writers have played with the idea of alternate time paths, changed histories, forced futures, and the consequences of playing God.

 In The Revisionists, Thomas Mullen gives us Zed, who’s come back to post 9/11 Washington, D.C. from a future he believes to be perfect.  In order to protect that perfectness, Zed’s job is to make sure that history unfolds exactly the same way it originally did.  But there are others who believe that every effort should be made to prevent horrific historic events from happening, and the fact that it might change the future is unimportant because it’s not all as perfect as Zed thinks.  As Zed chases down these “historic agitators” he becomes involved in the lives of three very different characters: Leo, a disgraced ex-CIA agent; Tasha, a lawyer mourning the death of her young soldier brother; and Sari, an Indonesian maid working in slave-like conditions for a Korean diplomat.  The story unfolds from these various perspectives as their lives all intertwine.  The reader is pulled into a world of intrigue, injustice and a little bit of time-travel philosophy as the novel hurtles along to a thrilling conclusion.

Laura J.

In a mere 144 pages Julie Otsuka manages to cover over one hundred years in the lives of Japanese picture brides and their families. Picture brides were the young women that came to America as mail-order brides, to be wed sight-unseen to Japanese men already established in their new country. Award-winning author Otsuka accomplishes this in an unusual style, using repetitive lists of events in an all-encompassing third person plural voice. Instead of focusing on the life story of a single character we learn of the cumulative events of many nameless characters: One of us . . . Some of us . . . None of us . . . It’s a bold and controversial style that would make for great discussion in a book group, as some will love the retrained power and dynamic of this style and others will feel the lack of a centralized characterization. There’s a haunting beauty to the story presented in this step-back style, and a distinctive way to tell a powerful story.

Laura

Red Cross nurse Nina Borg thinks she’s just doing a friend a simple favor when she agrees to pick up a suitcase from the train station. Little does she know this act will lead days on the run and a fight for her life, as well as the life of, yes, you guessed it, a vulnerable three-year-old she finds drugged inside the suitcase. Of course it’s not a simple choice to turn the boy over to the authorities. Instead, we learn how this bizarre event came to pass and the whys and wherefores of who wants what from whom. It’s a great story of good intensions gone horrible wrong. This Danish mystery keeps the pace whizzing along at the same time that it takes the time to give some real depth to its characters. This is the first book in a planned series.

Laura J.