Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan

This book broke my heart and I was not expecting it.  I've read African literature in the past (e.g., Half a Yellow Sun, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Infidel, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall), but nothing prepared me for this book.

The five unrelated stories are all about children in Africa growing up under terribly sad circumstances.  For example, one is about children told they are going to be sent to their godparents, but actually being sold to traffickers in Gabon; one is about siblings watching their mixed Tutsi/Hutu family violently fall apart in Rwanda; one is about a family barely surviving in a shantytown in Kenya.  All of the stories are told from the children's point of view, but the magnitude of the situations ought to be squarely adult material.

One of the stories is just a few pages long, and two are 100+ pages.  The other two stories are of more of a traditional short-story length. 

I won't forget this book for a long time.

Distant Hours by Kate Morton

I liked this book.

The story starts with a woman named Edie in the 1990's.  Edie finds out that as a child, her mother was sent to live at Milderhurst Castle during WWII.  Though her mother is not forthcoming with details, Edie decides to track down more information.  What she finds is a mysterious family - elderly twin sisters who never married and their younger sister, never quite "right" after her fiance breaks off their engagement. 

The book alternates between the 1990's and the 1940's, crafting a complicated story around the three sisters and their relationships, glimpsed for a few years by Edie's mom and then later by Edie. The castle itself is somewhat of a character as well, richly described and harboring lots and lots of family secrets.  Nothing in the story is what it seems - the twin sisters are very different from each other and their motives in life are not revealed right away.  And the seminal moment in the story - the evening when the younger sister's fiance does not show for dinner - is extraordinarily suspenseful. 

The first two-thirds of the book were really good, but the juicy stuff is in the payoff.  A well-done homage to the great Gothic stories...

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest by Steig Larsson

I had put off reading this final book in the Larsson Millennium trilogy, knowing it would be the end of reading something special - that there wouldn't ever quite be another set of books like this.  On my recent trip to Puerto Rico, however, curiosity won out and I devoured it in just a few days.

This book continues to follow heroine Lisbeth Salander, her allies (like Mikael Blomkvist and the Millennium Magazine staff) and her enemies (Zalachenko, Niederman, and Teleborian, to name a few).  Details around secret government divisions are discovered, further making this a novel with a major political axe to grind.  More issues arise around freedom of press, as Millennium and other papers play a strong part in the storyline. Ultimately many loose ends are tied up, and I'd say justice is served.

This may be my favorite of the three books, just because it is very clever. Many of the characters are involved in plots to do all sorts of things, and it was fun to be a part of it unfolding as the reader.  The new characters that were introduced were well-crafted, and seeing the ones that I knew already was like reuniting with old friends.

Rumor has it that Larsson's partner has a manuscript for a fourth book and that Larsson may have planned on as many as 10 books in the series.  Wow.  Hopefully one day the estate will work out its problems and continue publishing his ideas.

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

I read this book for my new book club, although unfortunately didn't attend the meeting for it at the last minute. I'm like the opposite of most book club members - I read the book but didn't attend.

The story is about Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway's first wife, and her relationship with him during the years when they lived in Paris.  From the beginning of the book, it's obvious that their marriage will fall apart, but the exquisite detail that McLain describes of their courtship, relationship, and (mostly) happy times was delightful to read.  Hadley comes across as immature, striving to fit into an artsy Paris that wasn't natural for her - she finds herself hob-knobbing with Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, for example, while she is mostly a caretaker, first of Hemingway, then of their child. 

I loved reading the background about what Hemingway was experiencing when he conceived Nick Adams and the events in his life that led to his writing The Sun Also Rises.  The Paris that McLain describes is fascinating and beautiful.  You don't have to know much about Hemingway to enjoy this book - in that way, it reminded me of Loving Frank.

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

I really wanted to like this book.  I still think about Never Let Me Go, also by Ishiguro, and hoped for something I would like as much.  I understood that his books were all supposed to be different, but I had high hopes.

This story is about a boy named Christopher who grows up in Shanghai in the early 1900s.  When his parents mysteriously disappear during his childhood, he is sent to London where he grows up to become a detective.  As an adult he returns to Shanghai to try and find out what happened to his parents, his ultimate reason for becoming a detective.  The storyline was good, with enough interesting characters and plot twists to keep me interested.  Christopher is somewhat of an unreliable narrator - that or he himself doesn't know the difference sometimes between fact and fiction.

However, the telling of the story - the tone - was really not compelling.  I remember while reading Never Let Me Go that the acetic nature of the storytelling was eerie, and supported the story quite well.  In this case, that same tone, rather dry and unemotional, was entirely wrong for this story.  It ultimately ruined my experience of reading this book.

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

I really enjoyed this collection of short stories by the author of Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake: A Novel. It's nice to start the year by reading a book I couldn't put down.

The phrase "unaccustomed earth" is from Hawthorne, referring to being somewhere unfamiliar. The stories are about people who are reconciling their Indian backgrounds and their modern lives. For example, the first story is about a woman whose moves to the West Coast with her husband and young son. Her father comes to visit for the first time since the death of her mother. A later story is about a young girl whose family becomes friendly with another Bengali transplant to Cambridge (MA), then deals with the cultural shock of his marrying an American girl.

The final three stories were a set of related stories about childhood friends who reunite in adulthood. The first is when they are children, the second is when they are college-ages, and the final story when they are adults. The stories were all compelling, many with unexpected twists.

Can't wait for Lahiri's next book. One for one in 2012 so far!