Up with the Lark

Mothers and Sons

Colm Toibin is a great favourite of mine.  His novel The Master was one of those exquisite books that you read slowly so it won't be over.  This book of short stories Mothers and Sons is also a work of great depth and beauty.  The relationship between mothers and their sons is a complicated and profound one and each story reveals something of the inherent struggle for balance, for love, and for power. This a nuanced book and there is much to think about.  In a really strong collection of stories A Long Winter stands out as a particularly wonderful piece.  A young man waits for winter to be over to recover the body of his mother who leaves her family to return to the house of her brother, haunted by  how it might all have been different. Buy at Amazon

The Law of Dreams

I loved every minute of this book.  The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens had me transported instantly to Ireland.  Set at the time of the potato famine in the mid-nineteenth century the book is beautifully evocative.  My daughter and I spent some time in that part of Ireland and visited the heartbreaking Potato Famine Museum in Skibbereen, but we were most surprised travelling around the country side to see that there were still small stone dwellings dotting the hills, abandoned and unchanged for the past 160 years.  The history of the place is everywhere and the unthinkable poverty and squalor in which these people lived is still evident.  The novel follows the character of Fergus as he is buffeted through this despairing time like so much flotsam.  He is a young man with nothing left to lose and so is willing to risk his life just to be gone from the place.  Poverty, starvation, illness, and betrayal are his lot.  There is a lot of page turning plot to this novel, but it's really the characters that make it come alive. Even the minor characters stand out in your memory. A really wonderful book. Buy at Amazon

Bang Crunch - A Rebuttal of sorts

Bang Crunch was reviewed here last week by my son Hugh Alter.  I wasn't going to write another review, but I don't entirely agree with his assessment of this book by Neil Smith, so I thought I would beg to differ.  I didn't find the subjects mundane (when you are approaching 50 the story of someone surviving cancer is anything but mundane), but I did feel that some of the stories worked better than others.  My favourite was the title story - tightly written and as brief as the main character's life.  Isolettes was another strong story and made me cry, although I should admit that just about anything involving babies or dogs makes me cry.  The only story I didn't like was Extremeties (Hugh and I agree on that) which just seemed a bit silly to me, rather than surreal.  I do think that Smith has a beautiful writing style and some wonderful imagery.  I found something worthwhile in every story and think it was worth the read. I think this is an interesting writer to watch. Buy at Amazon

The Blood Spilt

I seem to have quite a lot of Scandinavian mystery stories on my reading pile these days.  I find them very different in tone from English or North American mysteries.  There is a kind of formality and perhaps more civility to them.  I'm not sure if that comes from their society or if it is a function of reading a work in translation.  The urban mysteries don't have the kind of nastiness and grit you associate with Ian Rankin or Ken Bruen and the small town mysteries don't have the kind of fey charm of something by Simon Brett.  There is also a very strong sense of place in most of these novels.  This seems to me to be true of The Blood Spilt, the second novel by Asa Larsson.  I enjoyed this book, but my biggest complaint is that the plot is too close to her first novel, Sun Storms. I should let you know that if you read this book first, then you'll know who committed the murder in the first novel.  I always find that annoying in mysteries with recurring characters, but in this case you can see that Larsson wrote herself into a corner and really had to reveal the information, otherwise the behaviour of her main character wouldn't make sense.  I'll certainly give her third novel a try when it appears. Buy at Amazon