Hilda C. Landers Library & Archives

I read this book in my youth, in its hay day of popularity & decided to revisit it when I saw it was being made into a miniseries this year. This is the first novel in the Dollanganger Family Series. The story follows four young children (narrated by the eldest daughter Cathy) when their seemingly perfect life is up-ended by tragedy and results in them being locked in an attic, hidden from the world. This book will not go down in history as a literary classic, but it isn’t a trashy, poorly written novel either. The story is captivating and the main characters are endearing. There are themes in the book that have caused controversy over the years, but in my opinion, this is a good summer read.

Availability: USMAI or COSMOS
Review Submitted by: Liana Thompson
Rating: Recommended

Imagine a future without Natty Boh.

Set in a near-future Baltimore (“re”named B-Mor), On Such a Full Sea tells the story of Fan, a teenage employee of an Inner Harbor fish-farm who abandons the relative, repressive safety of her walled corporate-police state to search for her lover, Reggie. Reggie has mysteriously been disappeared by the corporate overlords of B-Mor after Reggie scores literally off-the charts in the frequent, dreaded, medical tests administered to all employees of the company-town.

Though the narrative follows Fan and Reggie, the story is told in an eerie, communal voice of the second-person plural which centers the story on the fate of B-Mor. Through this collective “we” we, the readers, learn that the present-day inhabitants of Baltimore largely hail from China, pressed into corporate slavery in order to escape an over-polluted and populated central China generations ago. Baltimore, and other cities alluded to in the Midwest, have also been largely depopulated by economic collapse and degraded food-supplies due to degraded environmental health before being repurposed as labor camps. The immigrants to B-Mor labor to produce “pristine” tilapia and other fish to sell to the “Charters;” walled enclaves for the rich, famous, and powerful. In between the company towns and the Charters lie the relatively lawless and impoverished “Counties.”

Through the community’s collective voice, the reader learns of B-Mor’s history, and speculates as to how Fan survives the routine horrors of the Counties, and later, a Charter Village in New York. The voice is haunting, and through this voice the dystopia presented in the novel comes across as believable and logical. At times the voice seems to grope towards both disquiet and outright rebellion before snapping back into the conciliatory and sheepish voice of a community held in total check by economic and police oppression. I found myself yelling at the community, “don’t you get how messed up that is? Or that!?” time and again. And time and again this line of questioning made me think about the grisly things about our culture and our time which we explain away or resign ourselves to as we try to make a living that is often complicit, if not downright supportive, of larger, destructive forces.

We live in turbulent times, and it seems there is a particular glut of dystopia in how contemporary authors are imagining the future in a world of growing economic inequality, climate change, globalization, and lightning-speed technological (and biotechnological!) innovation. Yet the deluge (pun intended) of apocalyptic and dystopic fiction– from The Hunger Games to Game of Thrones to Avatar, Oblivion, and other perennial summer blockbusters– can get tiresome and banal.

But to use a cliché to describe how Lee dispels them, On Such a Full Sea breaks free of the mold into which most dystopic futurescapes are cast. Perhaps that’s overstating it; its more that Lee playfully inhabits and shows off what a great literary talent can do with the chronically undervalued tropes of genre fiction. Lee’s other novels are largely realist; often taking up the lived experiences of Asian American immigrants facing exclusion, racism, and economic hardship both before coming to the US and throughout the rest of characters’ lives. Lee uses the near-future advances in medicine and luxury contrasted with corporate dominion to punctuate his metaphors of contemporary wealth-inequality in the world in On Such a Full Sea.

Elegantly written and especially gripping to those of us who have spent some time in Maryland, On Such a Full Sea is a dark story you won’t want to say goodbye to once you’ve come it its end.

We recommend it highly.

Availability: USMAI
Review Submitted by: Shane D. Hall
Rating: Highly Recommended.

In February 1910, Ursula Todd dies just as she is being born. Reborn, she survives infancy to drown as a toddler. Over her many lives, Ursula is murdered, dies in the London Blitz, freezes to death, and commits suicide. In each successive life, Ursula’s decisions and actions follow a different path that winds through many of the most important historical events of the first half of the 20th century. Although repetitive and difficult to follow at first, Atkinson’s Groundhog Day inspired story is an inventive and enthralling way of recounting the lives of the upper middle class in Great Britain during the world wars.

In much of the book, Atkinson focuses on Ursula’s lives during World War II and the Blitz. In one life, Ursula dies from a bomb in the basement of an apartment house in London. In another, Ursula, working as volunteer in the Civil Defense Service, rescues her (now unknown) neighbors from the same house. In yet another life, Ursula becomes a German citizen, spends time (reluctantly) with Eva Braun at Berghof, and dies amidst the ruins of Berlin in 1945.

A young, withdrawn Ursula visits a psychiatrist, who tells her that she may be remembering other lives: “time is a construct, in reality everything flows, no past or present, only the now.” Common threads – a murdered girl, a dog Lucky – emerge in many of Ursula’s lives, as she begins to piece together her place (or places) in a life of unlimited choices and their consequences.

The story’s unconventional formal structure, coupled with Ursula’s enchanting narration, has produced a brilliant book that will stick with you – a must read!

Availability: SMCM Library and USMAI
Review Submitted by: Kaitlyn Grigsby
Rating: Must Read

After the war, zombies became an infection of the dead, and vampirism seemed to be a solution for only the highest class. George Suttles is an investigator for the murder division of the police department, but now murders are so rare he is the only one left in the department. One day, there is a murder… of a vampire.
Warning: Adult content enclosed.

Availability: SMCM Library
Review Submitted by: Andrew Lachkovic
Rating: Recommended

Douglas Adams’ 1979 science fiction novel is often called one of the classics, and after reading the book it is easy to see why. The adventures of Arthur Dent after he takes refuge in space from the destruction of the earth are filled with  irony, and improbable coincidences that turn out to be not that improbable after all. Arthur, along with guide-book researcher Ford Prefect, President of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox, fellow human-turned-space-traveler Trillian, and depressed, paranoid robot Marvin, speed through the galaxy on a stolen ship searching for gold, mythical planets, and the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything.

Their adventures and mishaps were hilariously captivating and the book was a joy to read, though sometimes the out-of-this-world logic was difficult to grasp (though I imagine Arthur Dent himself had similar difficulties). I would recommend The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to anyone who wants a story with intriguing characters and humor throughout.

Availability: USMAI and SMCM Library
Review Submitted by: Brianna Glase
Rating: Must Read

Don’t read this book in the winter! I didn’t rate this as a Must Read mostly because of the theme of sexual perversion which seems to have carried over from the previous book, Hard Truth. Get back to the basics of just plain murder 😉 Anyway, Nevada Barr’s writing is superlative compared to other authors who crank out drivel several times a year. An excellent series of murder mysteries for anyone who is a fan of that genre!

Availability: COSMOS
Review Submitted by: J. Tyler Bell
Rating: Highly Recommended

Meet Estrella, a girl coming of age in rural California. Estrella and her family work as agricultural laborers in California. While California’s pastures of plenty paint a beautiful backdrop for the casual visitor, or more likely, the vast majority of Americans who buy the cheap produce shipped from the Central Valley to the four corners of the nation, the peach and grape orchards are the site of brutal labor conditions and little pay for Estrella’s family. The story of Estrella’s life takes shape for the reader out of fragmentary snippets of dialogue and scene-setting; the narrative constantly shifts perspective between characters in each scene.

In Under the Feet of Jesus, farm workers depend on their health, a running car, and abundant harvests in order to support their existence. All of these elements are uncertain and ultimately at the mercy of the natural world. Yet it is the un-natural human intervention of pesticide exposure which spurs the plot of Viramontes’ novel towards its enigmatic conclusion. Alejo, a teen who is friends with Estrella, is run down by a crop duster while stealing peaches from an orchard. Despite the high probability that the pilot of the duster would have been able to see Alejo running as fast as he could through the orchard, the plane’s shadow passes over Alejo “like a crucifix” before he is immersed in toxic spray. The disposable Alejo is poisoned, and falls to the care of Estrella’s family.

In order to save Alejo from the “daño of the fields,” Estrella must come to recognize Alejo will receive no help from the economic and political system which poisoned him in the first place. She’ll have to grasp the terrible tendrils of economic, racial, and environmental injustice in order to articulate her power within these unjust systems. In short, she’ll have to take action for herself, no matter the consequences to her own safety.

Under the Feet of Jesus is lean (only 176 pages in length) but rich in poetry, complex formal innovation, and weighty subject matter. Steinbeck fans will find some interesting allusions and inversions of The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden within Under the Feet of Jesus. With haunting, elegiac prose that highlights the natural beauty of California alongside the harsh poverty farm workers experience to this day, Viramontes matches Steinbeck stride for stride in this taught, powerful novel of the American West.

Availability: USMAI
Review Submitted by: Shane D. Hall
Rating: Peachy! Read Under the Feet of Jesus and realize how rotten that rating is.

The Five Chinese Brothers is a tale of five traitorous brothers, who must use their superpowers to escape or survive various forms of torture and/or execution the government subjects them to. Read to discover the astonishing conclusion to this age old tale.

Availability: USMAI and SMCM Library
Reviewed Submitted by: Matthew Lachkovic
Rating: Must Read

Published in 2009, The Windup Girl is the first novel by Paolo Bacigalupi. Winner of the Hugo and Nubela Awards (Sci-fi industry top prizes), The Windup Girl is set in a near-future Thailand. The kingdom of Thailand is a kind of fortress state, crouched in a defensive stance vis a vis the rest of the world. And not without reason; rogue diseases such as “blister rust,” “cibiscosis” and others only obliquely hinted at are poised to destroy Thai sovereignty. These diseases are both the unintentional, and quite intentional machinations of “calorie companies” (think Monsanto, Cargill, etc.) who have “taken over the world” by enslaving its peoples to genetically modified crops resistant to the latest competitive enterprise plagues. The plagues have greatly depleted natural biodiversity, and only those nations who have jealously cultivated and guarded seed banks have the bio-capital to engineer food and energy independence from the Iowa-based calorie companies. Bangkok runs expensive coal-fired fuel pumps to keep the city alive below rising seas, and the Environmental Ministry ruthlessly fights “Trade” and other foreign “invasives.”

Wind-Up creations, also called “New People,” are one such invasive. Like the androids and replicants typical to science fiction, these Wind-Up creations are human-like products of big industry and bioengineering. Emiko is the eponymous “Wind Up Girl,” and is the unwitting catalyst of the fast-paced political and environmental intrigue which propels the novel forward. Emiko was designed to be a sex-slave for a wealthy Japanese businessman who abandons her in Thailand (it’s too expensive to pay her passage back to Japan). In Thailand, Emiko is liable to be “mulched” by the zealous Environmental Ministry, and has to gain “employment” with a black-market sex club for protection from the Ministry. She is nightly assaulted and humiliated. While Emiko deplores her very existence, she struggles with her innate propensity to obey and please a master (traits supposedly lifted from Labrador retrievers in the gene-lab) and the indoctrination she received as a child. Emiko’s struggle to gain independence and safety ultimately breaks the fragile political and environmental truce the other characters strategize around for much of the novel, hurtling the nation and the characters towards an uncertain fate in a warming world.

The book is most distinctive and original in its conception of a post-fossil fuel, post-global turbo-capitalist future, and its interesting magic-realist moments (ghosts unable to reincarnate into a world too-full of suffering amble alongside living characters) are a cool genre-bending element. While Bacigalupi’s futuristic Thailand is rich in inventive detail, the fast-paced action and dialogue easily captivate the reader and keep you turning the pages so fast you won’t believe this beast of bookdom is over 450 pages. I shutdown my life to finish it in two days. Putting it down wasn’t an option.

If you wind up reading only one piece of genre fiction this summer, Bacigalupi’s Windup Girl should be it.

Availability: COSMOS
Review Submitted by: Shane D. Hall
Rating: Highly Recommended

A classic for the young adult fiction crowd. Reading this book is like taking an adventure. Throughout your adventure you make friends, learn new things and great evils. Take a chance and have an adventure.

 

Availability: COSMOS and SMCM Library
Review Submitted by: Andrew Lachkovic
Rating: Highly Recommended