Wild Abandon, by Joe Dunthorne

Blaen-y-Llyn, founded by Don and his wife, Freya, among others, is a commune dedicated to a natural way of life. Though once a thriving community of like-minded individuals, over the years membership has dwindled and now even Patrick, one of the founding members, has left to escape Don’s controlling nature. With Freya thinking of doing the same, Don’s marriage is faltering as well. In search of stability his teenage daughter, Kate, escapes to college, but living with her boyfriend’s family isn’t the haven of normalcy she was hoping for, and she left her beloved younger brother behind in her hasty retreat. As each of the characters comes to terms with the reality of their lives and relationships, a story unfolds that is about midlife crises, adolescent dramas, and self-discovery. With well developed characters and a dark humor reminiscent of that in his first novel Submarine, Dunthorne delivers hilarity and heart-break while redefining the essence of normal in this story about what makes a family, and what makes a family dysfunctional.

This was a great read.

Book 47 on my way to 52.

Greasewood Creek, by Pamela Steele

This book was pure poetry. I started reading it like a standard novel and found myself a little befudled, but a few chapters in I caught on and really started to enjoy the language. The story was a bit depressing, though. Avery is just a child when her younger sister dies, followed close after by her father’s desertion and her mother’s slide into alcoholism. Surrounded by family and friends she is able to stay and grow up on the Oregon ranch where she was born. As an adult she finds constancy there, but cannot escape the guilt she feels over her sister’s death. She hopes for happiness finally in the child she is expecting with her life partner, Davis, but when their newborn son dies the same forces of grief that tore apart her childhood engulf her again. Avery’s inability to escape the past is palpable in this fragmented narrative that mixes the present with flashbacks to her childhood and teen years, and Steele’s poetic style brings the beautiful Oregon ranch setting to life. Steele has depicted the depression, grief, and guilt of living after a loss with expert clarity, making this a powerful and faithful story of finding the inner strength to move forward and be reborn.

Book 44 on my way to 52.

His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman (review)

Setting all issues and agendas aside, this is a beautifully written young adult sci-fi story. I am inordinately critical when it comes to story writing, but I found myself falling in love with Lyra and her friends right from the beginning of this tale. Like most series I enjoyed the first book the most, but unlike others my interest had not seriously waned by the very last sentence, and now that I've finished I'm even looking into reading Pullman's additional works with these characters. They seemed so authentic, so believable, even in a universe acceptable only via suspension of disbelief, that I just fell in love with them each immediately.

The scenes, the suspense, the characters—all were rich and imagination grabbing throughout. The series is a calling together of many a myth and many a mystical culture, all given a physical meaning and existence. It is the story of an orphan who finds she has a purpose, and family, as she travels through an earth that is mostly foreign to us. Her journey is full of honor, magic, and love, and as she progresses we see her beginning to grow up. There is witchcraft, quantum mechanics, religion, death, sensuality. There is war, Armageddon style. There is love, there is a coming of age, but what could have become sappy or uncomfortable was written with sensitivity and authenticity so that it never crossed that line. The story is woven tightly and well, and it never let me drift away.

It has been said that Pullman's story is just shy of propaganda—the atheist's C. S. Lewis I think I've read—and with each successive book a message does become more obvious. It is with sharp literary skill that he doles out revelations of the symbolism and understory in carefully measured amounts. The final book is the most clear in terms of agenda, and not everyone will be comfortable with it, and The Golden Compass could conceivably be read as a stand alone, albeit with a rather plot hanging ending.

Books 28, 29, and 30 on my way to 52.