Dear Listener,

I didn’t read Virgin Suicides.  I haven’t read Middlesex.  I even failed to see the movie The Virgin Suicides.  Honestly, I hadn’t even heard of Jeffrey Eugenides until The Marriage Plot came in.  BUT!  I read The Marriage Plot. 

If you like the eighties, or French philosophy, or love triangles, or hopeless romantics, or mystics, or India, or intellectualism, please read this book.  If you disdain every single thing I mentioned, if you hate literature, if you can’t stand a modern love story set thirty years ago, do not read this book.

Even if you hate everything I mentioned, watch this video anyway.  Be creeped out.  Get yourself ready.  This video is brought to you by the good people who invented Halloween.

by Simon

I finished reading Nightwoods last week, and I will for sure be recommending it to many Lemuria readers during the holidays coming sooner than we’ll all be ready! Nightwoods is fast paced, plot driven, and well written. Although I usually read psychological realism, and usually character driven fiction, I found myself really enjoying this “story”. Since I had never read a Charles Frazier novel, but had, of course, known of his fame in Cold Mountain, I knew that I was in for a treat.

Initially what captivated me were the ease and powerful way in which Frazier uses sentence fragments. Not many writers can use this art form successfully without the writing seeming choppy, but Frazier seems quite at home and comfortable with their use:

A cool November day, blue sky and sunlight thin and angling, even at noon. Leaves entirely off most trees, but still hanging tough and reddish brown on the oaks. 

As I was reading this new Frazier novel, in my mind I was subconsciously comparing the setting to some of my long time favorite plot driven novels, such as Tim Gautreaux’s The Missing, as well as Ron Rash’s Serena. Readers who liked these fast paced, often mysterious plots, will also like Nightwoods, for Frazier, who grew up in the mountains of North Carolina is an expert in placing action in colorful settings.

At the beginning, the protagonist, a no-nonsense capable “outdoorsey” woman, has received from a social child care worker young twins who are the orphans of her previously murdered sister. Never having been married, and certainly never a mother, even Luce realizes immediately that there is something peculiar about these six or seven year old twins, mainly that they don’t talk. Trying to gain their confidence and love, Luce tries all sorts of things to get the “fire loving and setting” kids to start communicating. The reader learns that they probably witnessed the murder of their own mother and makes allowances for their behavior. They are quite clever and confident and certainly not dumb!  Frazier’s use of the flashback shows perfection as the reader also puts bits and pieces together of Luce’s past, as well as the past of her new significant other, who is actually the grandson of the old man who rented Luce the old resort hotel where she lives.

Toward the end of the novel as the action and suspense rapidly increase, the reader leans forward as the twins flee into the mountains to escape their mother’s murderer. Beautiful woodsy settings, expertly and carefully detailed by Frazier add to the delight of this story. This novel is sure to be recognized nationally. After all, Cold Mountain, Frazier’s first novel was an international best seller and also won the National Book Award in 1977. Thirteen Moons, published a few years ago,  was a “New York Times” best seller.

Come hear Charles Frazier read from this new novel on Tuesday, October 11, at 5 p.m. An autographed copy of Nightwoods is a rare opportunity to be seized, as well as a chance to hear a prominent contemporary writer, a master of the written word.

Nightwoods by Charles Frazier is our October First Editions Club pick along with What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes.

Click here to read Joe’s blog piece on Nightwoods.

-Nan

Philippa Gregory continues telling the stories of the women of the War of the Roses.

With The Lady of the Rivers  she lets us into the the world of Jacquetta, the Duchess of Bedford.  Jacquetta is a descendant of Melusina, the river goddess, and like many of her family before her has inherited the ‘gift’ of second sight.  As advised by her aunt, Jacquetta tries to keep her powers a secret but soon catches the eye of the Duke of Bedford.  After their marriage, he introduces her to the mysterious world of alchemy and tries to use her ‘sight’ to keep the English in control of France.

While in his household, Jacquetta befriends her husbands squire, Richard Woodville, and after the Dukes death secretly marries Woodville.  The Woodvilles return to England and take their place at the Lancastrian court where Jacquetta becomes a close friend and loyal subject to the new Queen Margaret.  Jacquetta and Richard are leading a very happy life at court and their home full of children until King Henry VI  falls into a mysterious sleep and the Queen turns to advisors who may not have the kingdom best interest at heart.

War ensues between the Lancasters and the Yorks for the throne and Jacquetta does her best to fight for her King and Queen but also the best interest of her children especially her daughter, Elizabeth.  She has sensed a very fortunate turn of events for Elizabeth’s future which mysteriously involves the white rose of York.

The Lady of the Rivers is a prequel to Gregory’s previous books in The Cousin’s War series, The White Queen about Elizabeth Woodville and The Red Queen about Margaret Beaufort.  This series tells the story of the Plantagenets, the houses of York and Lancaster, who ruled and constantly were at war for the crown before the Tudors came into power.

I have throughly enjoyed reading Gregory’s novels about both the families of the War of the Roses and the Tudors. I try to always read some non-fiction about the characters that I read in all the historical fiction that I read so I was pleased to see that along side the publication of this new novel Philippa Gregory along with David Baldwin and Michael Jones have published a book with historical essays about the three women of The Cousin’s War Series.

What is also interesting is that Gregory discusses the differences in history and historical fiction and just exactly how speculation plays a role in writing each.  Anyone who has any interest at all in this time period will be well served to pick up this book also.  The Women of the Cousin’s War is on my beside table at this very moment.

When I think about books that stick with me, often I think of those books in school that made me fall in love with books (Wuthering Heights), or the ones that sparked my interest to begin with in childhood (Shiloh, The Borrowers), or the ones that I have devoured because of their amazing stories and worlds (Harry Potter, The Hunger Games).

Now, imagine a book that could have been all of those things and you have The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I took this picture of my advanced reading copy in April, and although the cover has changed since then, my enthusiasm for this book hasn’t wavered since I first cracked it open. Erin Morgenstern has created a magically amazing world that I lingered in over a month for fear of finding myself on the last page of The Night Circus.

It is at magical Le Cirque des Rêves that most of this story takes place. A circus that opens at nightfall and closes at dawn. A world in which the only colors are black and white, where the figments of your imagination are no longer figments, and where Celia and Marco play in a game of magic they were chosen for as children.

Much like a tennis game is played on a tennis court, this magical match takes place within the night circus. Each player tries to outdo the other with their creations within the circus. From a garden made of ice to a maze made of clouds, these two magicians make their moves in the public arena of Le Cirque des Rêves. But as they get to know each other by their magic, they begin to fall for each other.

Celia and Marco are not the only ones to fall in love while at the night circus. Many become enchanted with the circus itself and although Le Cirque des Rêves never announces where it will show up next, they have created a network in which they can follow the circus from place to place. These enthusiasts are called rêveurs. They dress in black and white when they attend the circus, except for one dash of red. They want to pay homage to the circus, but yet stand apart from it. Over time, this guise becomes how rêveurs identify each other while at the circus.

Much like our friend Emily Crowe (check out her blog on their Night Circus event), many of us at Lemuria feel the same enchantment for Le Cirque des Rêves as the rêveurs in The Night Circus do. Therefore, on Monday, October 3rd the date The Night Circus author Erin Morgenstern comes to Lemuria, we will all be dressed accordingly in our black and white with a dash of red. We cordially invite you to come experience the magic and excitement for yourself.

Set in current day Miami, this new cutting edge novel Birds of Paradise examines a family slowly and devastatingly coming unglued, for the most part due to the catastrophic disappearance of their run-away daughter who emerges off and on over a five year period only to beg for money, which her frantic mother is very willing to give her in order to have a chance to see her lost teenaged girl. Besides the mother and daughter in this dysfunctional modern day family,  the other two members, the father and the son, also have their own problems, which, of course, are made worse by the disappearance of Felice.

Though the tumultuous plot does merit attention from time to time, the characters and their motivations primarily drive this novel’s force.

Take Felice, who has lived “on the streets” of Miami, which in this case really means the beaches, along with numerous other disturbed teenagers who sometimes find refuge from the heat in an abandoned old house which is rumored to have been the death spot of an old woman a few years earlier. Questions as to how Felice manages to buy food and other necessary items for a meager existence immediately occur to the reader who has already been told of Felice’s ferocious natural beauty.

It soon becomes clear that national modeling talent scouts have discovered Felice, as well the local tattoo parlors, all who pay her handsomely for a photo shoot. Not only on  a couple of occasions, does the reader learn that total strangers regularly ask Felice, “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Elizabeth Taylor?”

Felice’s mother is a professional pastry chef; Her brother owns a local produce store. You might get hungry while you read Birds of Paradise.

Of course, the reader, after meeting her economically secure family who lives in a very comfortable house, wonders why in the world a 13 year old beautiful girl with all advantages, would choose to leave her home, her parents, and her lifestyle. Eventually Felice discloses the  fact that her premeditated removal from her home and a normal existence involves a self induced punishment propelled by something involving a best girlfriend who had a flowered past.

The reader is left with this question almost until the very end of the novel.  As a love relationship evolves, Felice, a now edgy self-reliant 17 year old, uses her skateboard to evade the suitor’s advances, knowing all along that Emerson, whose father named him after Ralph Waldo, marches to a better beat than the other homeless kids. He even seems to want a normal future, and that begins to appeal to Felice.

The distraught mother, Avis, whom Felice’s disappearance  affects the most, of course, throws  herself into magnificent pastry creations for which she is known in all of the culinary circles of Miami, having established a successful restaurant catering business early in her adulthood, even before Felice and her brother, Stanley, were born. An interesting sub plot involves a very rowdy talking bird who lives next door, whose owner is a mystical immigrant woman who works a “spell” to entice Felice to return home. This “aside” serves to show the reader the utter desperation of Avis who will try almost anything to get Felice to come home.

(Abu-Jaber immerses you in the beautiful, sensual and affluent parts of Miami, but this is contrasted with Felice’s choice to be homeless.)

Even as Felice had started to become a moody pre-teen, her mother tried to win her over with yummy concoctions hoping that she would become interested in the art of pastry making. Alas, this ploy does not work on Felice, but it does on her older brother who withdraws from teenage boy activities more and more to stay home and work with his mother in the kitchen, even more so once his sister disappears. Needless to say, the runaway Felice and her absence has colored the very existence of each member of this distraught family. Eventually, Stanley plants vegetables and herbs in the back yard and becomes interested in organic gardening, a few years later turning that interest into opening an organically focused grocery store, much to his attorney father’s dismay.

The father, Brian, after all, as a successful, but nevertheless unfulfilled attorney, wanted his son to go to college and chose a traditional career, certainly not one where he had to scrounge for customers, and therefore money. As the author lets the reader in on Brian’s world as a high powered Miami real estate lawyer, it becomes clear that every single member of this family is coming unglued at the seams.

The ending, which encompasses the last fifty pages or so, is one of the best that I have read in some time. Every action moves toward a point of completion, fulfillment, and resolution for the reader as the characters grow and become more stable human beings. Not all problems are totally resolved, but there is hope and growth exhibited in each character. For interest and suspense, I suppose, the author does not have the runaway daughter doing exactly what her parents want her to do, but there is communication and heart felt involvement. For a contemporary look  into a teenager’s world, this novel hits the nail on the head with its cutting edge language and plot.

Author Diana Abu-Jaber will be reading at Lemuria from Birds of Paradise this afternoon at 5:00. This is a reading to be attended!  -Nan

by Kelly Pickerill

Just like in the film industry, the fall is the season when some of the best books of the year are published. Publishers are gearing up for the holiday season, and slot all their brightest gems, from new authors to the old reliables, to come out during the last months of the year. So this week is an exciting one for Random House, and for us Lemurians, and for you readers, too, because The Night Circus has arrived!

I’m not sure why we haven’t talked much about the book publicly yet, because for months now we’ve certainly been talking about it in the store. We had a couple of advanced copies back in May, when John and Joe went to BEA (the big book conference in NYC), and came back telling us that everyone there was talking about the book. For a new author, whose book is months away from publication, to be buzzed about at a bookseller’s conference like BEA, that’s huge!

Lisa had already quietly read it in April (due to the savvy work of our Random House rep, Liz) and by the end of the May conference our advanced copies were hot as they passed from reader to reader. To date, these are the Lemurians who have read and loved this book:

Lisa, Kaycie, Zita, Emily, Kelly, Anna, Claire, Quinn, Ashley, Nan, Maggie. That’s just about everyone on our staff.

Erin Morgenstern visits with followers of The Night Circus at BEA in May.

On Erin Morgenstern’s book tour you can expect some enthusiastic events. One reason for this is because the book lends itself so well to creativity. The circus is the foreground of a behind-the-scenes duel between two magicians who at first don’t know each other’s identities, so they have to be content to “one-up” each other through the medium of the circus attractions. They create an ice garden, an enchanted clock, a cloud maze, and many other nifty no-limit-to-the-imagination things.

Lemuria’s event with Erin, which is October 3rd, starting at 5, is no exception. Most everything is in the planning stages still, and it’s also hush hush, but suffice it to say that you can expect to walk into a circus in the Dotcom building that Monday evening.

The Night Circus is our September pick for First Editions Club. Though Erin won’t be here till October 3rd, some of the copies that arrived this week were pre-signed. Come pick up your copy of the debut novel that’s got everyone talking this fall — The Night Circus is a thrilling, magical tale from beginning to end.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Random House, September 2011)

When this new novel arrived in the fiction room not too long ago, I was mesmerized by its catchy cover depicting a woman reclining on a chaise lounge dressed in a long period dress circa 1930s, with a handsome well dressed man gazing at her. They are obviously in a garden enjoying cigarettes, some sort of refreshment, and lively conversation, based on the huge seductive smile on her face.  I kept looking at this cover wondering what  Rules of Civility was about, not withstanding the obvious.

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As a debut novelist, the author Amor Towles has scored, as we say! Surprisingly, he is a principal at an investment firm in Manhattan, though, once upon his graduation  from Yale, he went on to receive  his master’s degree in English from Stanford. I liked his credentials immediately once I read this, but I wondered if his current involvement  in the cosmopolitan New York business world had rendered him void of exceptional fictional writing talent. Once I read that his debut novel is currently in the top five picks of the NPR recommended novels, however, I became  interested in reading this period piece for sure.

Set primarily in 1938, only a year before the Great Depression hit, New York City was abuzz with well educated, glamorous, fun loving, and often risque twenty somethings. Life was good, and living was great.

Into that environment the female protagonist Katherine, or “Katie” Kontent (pronounced like the state of well being) enters, but not as a socially privileged girl, for even though her upbringing was in the city, she was not from the Upper East Side, nor a debutante, nor did she want to be. The gaiety of the times surrounded Katie as she lived in a girls’ boarding house and met numerous eligible bachelors with whom she became involved.

One of the enticing features for the reader is the knowledge acquired about the diverse  restaurants and bars, many of which had once banded women, but were now reluctantly letting them enter, much to the dismay of some men. One particular scene, which was very fun, involved a dinner at the 21 Club. Having spent some time in New York several years ago, I was eager to read about some of the same locales which I had frequented and to learn about their customs in the late 1930s.

While most girls of the time period were searching for youthful rich potential husbands, bidding their time with only minor secretarial jobs, Katie’s intelligence and drive took her ultimately to a rising publication akin to a mixture of “The New Yorker” and “Vogue.” Because of her drive and initiative, she was once asked by her boss if she even liked men! Even though Katie could barely make ends meet once she obtained her own small apartment, she continued to work extremely hard for her boss, sometime working until 2 and 3 a.m., with no overtime pay, of course, during this time period.

Katherine’s particular love interest, which waxes and wanes throughout, throws the reader onto an emotional roller coaster throughout the novel. The author’s emotive ability to manipulate the reader’s desires to root for the heroine should not be underestimated, and at times, the reader wants to take Katherine into another room and talk to her about her decisions, some which seem so wrong for her.

The frame story, which initially puts Katherine in the 1960s, with her husband in the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking at 1930s photos, which happen to have a special someone from the past in them, provides a very effective way to tell the story. Of course, the ending of the book reluctantly throws the reader forward once again to the 1960s.  Not all writers can take on the frame story and have it work as well as Amor Towles does in this novel.

One more thing of great interest to me did involve the title: Rules of Civility, the source of which is actually a short pamphlet composed by the young George Washington entitled “Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation.”

Apparently this short publication was the guide book for all young men of manners and aspirations. It so happens that Katherine’s primary love interest studied, memorized, and applied the 110 rules of etiquette and behavior in his every day life to the extent that he seemed (underline “seemed”) to be flawless. To add to the interest of this novel, the 110 rules are added in the Appendix at the end of this work of fiction.

Take a look at one of the last pages in this incredibly enjoyable novel in order to get a feel for this author’s beautiful language:

“It is a bit of a cliche to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time–by the slightest turn of the wheel, the wisdom goes, we influence the chain of events and thus recast our destiny with new cohorts, circumstances, and discoveries. But for the most of us, life is nothing like that. Instead, we have a few brief periods when we are offered a handful of discrete options. Do I take this job or that job? In Chicago or New York? Do I join this circle of friends or that one, and with whom do I go home at the end of the night? And does one make time for children now? Or later? Or later still?

In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions–we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card, and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.”

Those readers who loved the poet T.S. Eliot’s “The Lovesong of J.Alfred Prufrock,” as I did, will well remember the language that Amor Towles referred to in this quote. I loved Rules of Civility already, but when I read the above, well, then, I was hooked on this novel for sure! Give yourself a treat and read this novel, and give it as a gift to someone this Christmas!

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles (The Viking Press, an imprint of Penguin, July 2011)

-Nan