Picks of the Week

CITY OF BONES, by Cassandra Clare

(originally posted on May 4, 2008)

I read this on the flight home from the LA Times Festival of Books and it really is about the perfect airport read: fantastic storytelling, characters whose adventures and melodramas wrap you in their spells and really ass-kicking action scenes involving demons and all manner of underworld types. Sure, Clare clearly owes a huge debt to Buffy and Harry Potter, but dammit, I want to find out what will happen next to Clary, Jace, Simon & co. - and that's exactly the button that's supposed to be pushed.

EVERYMAN LIBRARY EDITION OF 4 NOVELS, Irene Nemirovsky

(originally posted on May 4, 2008)

I'd recommend this simply based off of the utter gobsmacking brilliance that is LE BAL, one of the most crystalline and shocking novellas I've ever read, but the other three works simply confirm Nemirovsky's literary brilliance. THE COURILOF AFFAIR is a wonderful surprise for mystery readers because it's her version of a spy novel, tackling the moral quandaries of terrorism for a so-called greater good by personalizing the narrator's deeds and misdeeds. In other words, Nemirovsky's entire backlist can't be translated fast enough for me.

THE LEMUR, by Benjamin Black

(originally posted on May 4, 2008)

Anyone who thinks John Banville lacks a sense of humor clearly did not read his serial for the New York Times magazine, available in novella-ish format in July. The story has all the basic crime ingredients - blackmail, adultery, murder, betrayal, that sort of thing - but it is so, so clear how much fun Banville had writing this pseudonymous exercise, loading up sentences filled with bizarre but well-placed metaphors and gently (or not so gently!) lampooning his characters as he moves them around his narrative chess board.

DAUGHTERS OF THE NORTH, by Sarah Hall

(originally posted on May 4, 2008)

Goddamn, Hall can write, and her chosen dystopian subject matter gives her the chance not only to show off her sentence-by-sentence chops but to demonstrate how few steps removed our current culture is from the apocalyptic fervor of her world, where the reproductive rights of women are trampled on so definitively it takes an army of women to try, however futile the exercise might be, to take some independence back. I can't think of enough good things to say about this except that it should be read, now and years to come.

ANGEL RIOTS, by Ibi Kaslik

(originally posted on May 4, 2008)

Reading this novel was like being transported back to the mid-1990s Montreal I knew during my college years. But it also affords an inside look at the ups and downs, the politics and the dramas, the hookups and breakups endemic to a rising rock band. It's clear, whether told from the vantage point of the young violin prodigy with a boy's name or her bandmate looking to redefine himself outside the orbit of his best friend (and leader) that Kaslik knows this world cold, and we're privileged to share in this knowledge.

THE GENIUS, by Jesse Kellerman

(originally posted on March 22, 2008)

As good as Kellerman's first two thrillers were, this is really quite an achievement. He takes a frankly narcissistic protagonist and wrings out enough empathy that I got caught up in the surrounding suspense involving the discovered artwork of a seemingly lost genius, the petty jealousies of the art world and a decades-old cold case. The end result can only be labeled a cerebral high-wire act interspersed with affecting flashbacks that add to the story momentum, not detract from it.

BLACK FLIES, by Shannon Burke

(originally posted on March 22, 2008)

Even before I read this slim tome my feeling was that this would be a darker, murkier version of Joe Connelly's BRINGING OUT THE DEAD, and I was mostly right. Burke's evocation of early 1990s New York is dead-on, as is the burnout and despair of paramedics who can't afford to understand or empathize with those they are tasked to treat. No wonder lines are crossed and consequences are enormous.

BLOOD KIN, by Ceridwen Dovey

(originally posted on March 22, 2008)

The prose is stunning. The structure is interlocking and brilliant, gender lines divided into two parts. The unnamed characters are brilliantly delineated, lushly drawn and teeming with the full spectrum of terror and looming destruction. Dovey's debut should feel post-modern and bloodless in the way she handles the aftermath of a coup but instead feels the exact opposite, the seams barely containing all the suppressed emotion within. The attention it's received since its UK release last year is wholly, absolutely deserved.

LAST LAST CHANCE, by Fiona Maazel

(originally posted on March 22, 2008)

I'm not sure I want to know what Fiona Maazel dreams at night, or if she's completely untroubled during sleep. What I do know, and wish to impart, is that her first novel is a messy, sprawling, nervy and daring synthesis of post-apocalypse, hippie ethos, and genuinely moving moments with one very screwed up, pill-popping, off-kilter protagonist who glues the whole damn thing together because she's trying so hard not to care even though that's about all she can do. LAST LAST CHANCE doesn't always work but I applaud Maazel for taking serious story and narrative risks here.

SOUTH BY SOUTH BRONX, by Abraham Rodriguez

(originally posted on March 22, 2008)

Not only is this an exhilarating ride through Bronx neighborhoods not normally depicted in contemporary fiction, but Rodriguez shines in portraying the vagaries of the writing and artistic life, the seedy underbelly of would-be criminals on the make and the deafening roar of the subway as it careens through all five boroughs and back again. SOUTH BY SOUTH BRONX plays some devilish tricks upon mystery conventions and I, for one, was very glad to be played.