Picks of the Week

WHITE IS FOR WITCHING, by Helen Oyeyemi

(originally posted on May 23, 2009)

A short description of Oyeyemi's third novel can't really do the book justice, but I'll give it a shot: it's about a house with a sinister mind of its own; a fey young woman prone to pica, a disorder that causes a person to eat inanimate materials like paper; the costs and consequences of being and acting different; and the specter, sometimes unholy, of what can't be seen and what remains lost. I finished WHITE IS FOR WITCHING in awe of Oyeyemi's talent, just as I did with her previous books. I suspect this will remain my reaction in the future as well.

LAKE WITH NO NAME, by Diane Wei Liang

(Originally posted on May 23, 2009)

She first broke into the US market with two excellent mystery novels set in the aftermath of the Tianenmen Square massacre in 1989, and their success - not to mention the 20th anniversary of the seminal event - spurred the reissue of Liang's 2003 memoir of growing up in the midst of the Cultural Revolution and her part, large and small, in the student democracy movement that would ultimately be crushed by rolling tanks. As great memoirs should be, LAKE WITH NO NAME recontextualizes history from the standpoint of one looking back on her younger years with accumulated wisdom and greater understanding.

THE LITTLE STRANGER, by Sarah Waters

(originally posted by May 23, 2009)

As recent rapturous reviews attest, THE LITTLE STRANGER is delightfully spooky and even better, a meditation on why it's not such a great idea to cling to past rituals and why class boundaries, when transgressed, wreak a great deal of havoc. The pages flew by as I found myself immersed in Dr. Faraday's increasingly obsessive visits to Hundreds Hall, caught up in the machinations and dramas of the Ayres family and finding his own latent and overt prejudices exposed like raw nerves. The feel is deliberately claustrophobic and also paradoxically open, but always keeping to the axiom that nothing is ever what it seems.

THE CITY AND THE CITY, by China Mieville

(originally posted on May 23, 2009)

Those familiar with Mieville's epic, baroquely written fantasy novels might be in for a surprise with this curveball of a detective novel, set in a world somewhat resembling ours but very much of its own ilk. There's an Eastern European flavor, a dead body where it shouldn't be and a secret crevice that lies between two cities that may or may not be true - especially as those who search for it end up meeting their maker. But the thing about Mieville is that his gigantic imagination can't quite be contained by his chosen genre, tearing through constraints like the monsters he loves and creates so thrillingly. But I love what he's done with the form in THE CITY AND THE CITY, and hope he'll come back and mold it to his vision some more very soon.

A PRAYER FOR THE DYING, by Stewart O'Nan

(originally posted on May 23, 2009)

I cannot express how glad I am this book, first published in 1999, was recently reissued in a handsome trade paperback edition. It is astonishing in how much pain and sorrow and hope and prayer and righteousness and longing and terror it contains in less than 200 pages, depicting the spread of an unnamed virus through a small town around the time of the Civil War but really depicting what it means to be in the grip of a situation out of the control of mere humans - even as it redefines the very definition of humanity. Is it definitive O'Nan? If not, it's awfully close.