Labor Day by Joyce Maynard

I have always liked Joyce Maynard's books. Baby Love and To Die For, both of which I read several years ago, are still pretty fresh in my mind as books I really enjoyed. More recently I read The Usual Rules, a young adult novel dealing with 9/11. Although the subject matter in all of these books is disturbing, they are terrific and interesting reads and approach difficult subjects with frankness, honestly and sensitivity.

Maynard's a good writer - and has an interesting story.  She dropped out of Yale to live with J.D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye) when he was in his 50's and she just barely 20.  She wrote about that relationship in her memoir, At Home in the World, which I have not read, but plan to at some point.  

Like her other novels I have read, Labor Day deals with disturbing subject matter - a description of "what happens" in the book sounds implausible, but in Maynard's talented hands, the story is  believeable, very touching and poignant. She really develops these characters so skillfully for the reader that you feel you know and understand them and what they do and how they react to the situations described.

This is really a coming of age story - the story of Henry, a 13 year old boy living with his agoraphobic mother in a small town in New Hampshire (where Maynard grew up, by the way). When they venture out into the world right before Labor Day to buy new school clothes for Henry, they meet and are "abducted" by an escpaped convict. He turns out to be very different from what you would expect.

This is a page-turner, for sure, but also a very touching story about love.

Highly recommended!

One more interesting thing- for me anyway - is the fact that Danielle, my son's fiance, went to school with Maynard's children!

Strangers by Anita Brookner

One of my favorite authors....

But I found this kind of slow....tedious.....

The writing is incredible. I cannot undermine the writing. But I did find the story a bit ponderous.

The female characters are interesting....I enjoyed hearing about Vicky, who the main protagonist meets on a plane to Venice, but the other female characters....

Not so sure

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

A beautifully written and very disturbing novel that takes place in India in the mid-1980's amidst terrorist violence. The novel is pre 9/11 but "feels" very much like a post 9/11 novel.
There are four major characters: Sai, the judge, the cook and his son. Sai is the granddaughter of the judge and the cook is the judge's cook. Biju, the cook's son, manages to get to America to find the "charmed life," only to find it alienating, difficult and degrading.
Injustice is a major theme of the novel and we are exposed, again and again, on how the west exploited the east and how even within India, people exploit each other in so many ways every day.
This was a powerful book; at times, it was lyrical and "light" and at other times, dark and quite disturbing. Her writing is really incredible. Not an easy read, but an enlightening tale of lives and settings that are unfamiliar to me.