Ballantine Books

Arcadia Falls

brittany — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Meg Rosenthal needs a fresh start after the death of her husband. She gave up her career as an artist when her daughter Sally was born, but when she is left with virtually nothing except for a barely functional car, she finds a job teaching folklore and English at a small boarding school for young artists in upstate New York. Sally, now a teenager and a promising artist herself, is admitted to the Arcadia School where her mother will work. Meg hopes that this new career will not only allow her to research the school’s founders—Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhardt—for her dissertation, but perhaps she will also find the daughter she once knew instead of the sullen girl who hides away with her iPod and drawings.

The Arcadia School is the perfect setting for a gothic campus novel, having inspired its creators to write and illustrate many of their own fairy tales. This book is replete with many signature fairy tale elements: a cottage in the woods, an orphan, a murderous villain, and even a Prince Charming of sorts. However, the fairy tales of Arcadia Falls are not the stuff of Disney movies; rather, they are more akin to the Grimm Brothers’ darker stories. Perhaps the darkest element of the school’s past is the tragic death of Lily Eberhardt, who fell into a clove while allegedly leaving the school to run off with her lover, her body missing for weeks before anyone realized that she had never made it off the school’s grounds. Shortly after Meg and Sally arrive, a student falls into the same deep valley during one of the school’s many Pagan rituals. It does not take long before Meg and others at the school begin to wonder if this death was truly an accident.

Carol Goodman’s Arcadia Falls is reminiscent of her earlier novel, The Lake of Dead Languages, a similarly dark boarding school story in which there are mysterious recurring deaths. In this rendition, Goodman delivers a rich and fast-paced novel that moves fluidly between the history of the Arcadia School, the changeling tale written by the school’s founders, and Meg and Sally’s contemporary story. Passages from the changeling story and from Lily’s journal add depth and authenticity to the novel. Keeping the facts straight in this complex, multi-generational plot line can be difficult at times, but ultimately Goodman achieves a thought provoking comparison between the lives of female artists in the mid-twentieth century and today.

While there are numerous subplots built into the book, the overarching question Goodman asks is whether a woman can be both a mother and an artist. The Arcadia School’s founders were required to sacrifice family life for the sake of their careers, while Meg initially did just the opposite. Yet, in rebuilding her life, Meg comes to realize that if she wants to teach her daughter the virtues of being a strong, independent woman, she must find a way to juggle her responsibilities. This is a message that will resonate with many modern readers questioning whether the paths toward family and career must be mutually exclusive.

Written by: Melanie Goodman, April 8th 2011

The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn

payal — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Alison Weir

Ballantine Books

While the dramatic story of Anne Boleyn is familiar to many, very few actual facts are present in the typical retelling. In The Lady in the Tower, historian Alison Weir takes a day by day look at the life of Anne Boleyn and the social and political culture which influenced her fate.

In her time, Anne Boleyn was one of the most recognized women in the world. Anne was the first woman to be made Queen solely for love, rather than for political alliance or financial gain, and for this alone; she was the subject of much scandal. King Henry VIII had abandoned both social convention and the political protocol of the monarchy, defied the Pope and declared himself the head of the English Church, all in order to set aside his aging wife, Katherine of Aragon, and marry Anne, Katherine’s maid of honor.

Katherine had failed to produce an heir, and that task now fell to Anne. Anne’s position depended solely on the King’s love for her, which dwindled as one pregnancy after another failed to provide the King with the son he required. He needed a legitimate heir, and this required that he have a wife capable of bearing sons. As Katherine before her, Anne’s downfall began when the King’s eye began roving for a more suitable candidate.

Henry VIII had waited six years to marry Anne, yet after only three years of marriage, Anne was arrested on charges of adultery, incest, and treason and sentenced to death. The Lady in the Tower details the last four months of Anne’s life, from her conviction until her death on May 19, 1536, and the changes wrought on the political climate by her execution.

While exceptionally well researched, the record is exhaustive, and the scholarly tone offers little in the way of entertainment. Based largely on excerpts of letters and formal court correspondence, this book reads more like a very long and well annotated thesis paper than anything meant for widespread publication. The bibliography alone shows the results of what was likely years of document collection and cataloguing. This book is clearly not intended for the casual reader, as following the narrative requires general knowledge of the events and persons involved. I have a great interest in the Tudor era, and this book was still often poisonously dull.

The Lady in the Tower would be an extremely helpful resource if you were writing about the subject, but for the general reader, I cannot see that there would be any appeal.

Written by: Melissa Ruiz, March 3rd 2011

Beachcombers

payal — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Nancy Thayer

Ballantine Books

Sometimes there is so much heavy reading material to get through, that what you really need is a short, light, fun book, and Beachcombers is just that. The novel centers on three sisters and their father and what they learn about themselves and each other in that time.

Their mother died when they were young and the oldest sister, Abbie, took some of the burden of raising her younger sisters because her father was dealing with his grief. Now adults, the youngest sister, Lily, is the only one who still lives with her father in Nantucket. The middle sister, Emma, moves back home after being dumped and losing her job because of the bad economy. Abbie has returned to help console her sister and spend time with her family. Meanwhile, their father has rented a room to Marina, a woman who is dealing with a break-up of her own.

As the summer starts, the family is scattered as each member deals with their own lives. As the summer progresses, they start to come together as they face falling in love and letting go of their mother, whose death still affects them.

What I loved most about this book is how much the reader gets to know each woman in the story. Though written in the third person, each chapter focuses on one of the sisters or on Marina. We get to know their insecurities, what they’re really thinking, and how they really feel about one another. Most importantly, we get to see how the past continues to affect them and how they reconcile that with the promise of their future.

The thing that surprised me about this book was how it was able to bring up issues of grief, mental health, depression, suicide, etc. while remaining a light read. I suppose most people would classify this as chick lit, so in some respects, you know what you’re getting when you start reading it. And yet it kept me interested on a deeper level than I expected when I picked it up.

Of course, most of it was very predictable, but I was impressed by how much I enjoyed reading it in spite of that. If you completely hate anything that might fall near the realm of chick lit, then I suppose it’s best to stay away. But if you’re open to having some fluff accompany interesting women characters and discussions about mental health, then it’s definitely worth checking out Beachcombers.

Written by: frau sally benz, November 15th 2010

Juliet: A Novel

gwen — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Anne Fortier

Ballantine Books

We all know Shakespeare's story of two star crossed lovers; it’s heartbreakingly romantic and tragic at the same time. It’s also a storyline that has lasted since its debut and has inspired many a story since.

One of these stories—Juliet—is the authorial debut of Anne Fortier.

We've all read, one way or another, some twist of the Bard’s original play. And if you’re a writer you may have written one yourself (I know I have). That’s not a crime—it’s a classic for a reason, after all. The real crime would be not doing the original piece justice—a crime Anne Fortier has not committed.

In Juliet, our author asks a question many historians have asked: “Were Romeo and Juliet real?” That question begins a magical adventure-filled ride through the beautiful Italian city of Siena.

Julie Jacobs is your average twenty-something year-old who doesn't know much about who she is; except for the fact that she's spent most of her life in the shadow of her flamboyant twin sister Janice. When their aunt Rose dies, Julie embarks on a treasure hunt that her mother, dead of twenty years, left to her.

As expected Julie's hunt is for gold and jewels, but the real mystery and treasure is buried in the histories of Siena and her family.

In Juliet, it turns out that Shakespeare didn't know how close to the truth he came when he wrote the words, “A plague on both your houses.” Julie crawls around in forgotten Siena tunnels, gets chased down cobblestone streets by some shrouded guy on a motorcycle, and unwittingly falls in love with both her destined enemy and her Romeo. Readers go on not one, but two, journeys as the novel flips seamlessly back and forth between Julie's story in the present and Romeo and Juliet's of 1340.

With too many plot twists to count, five centuries of family drama, and power struggles, Juliet can please any type of reader—whether you enjoy historical fiction, romance, adventure, or mysteries, Anne Fortier has managed to put it all in this very satisfying rewrite of a literary king.

It is a daring author who will take on Shakespeare with their first novel and a talented one who can do it so well. I wait with bated breath to see what comes next.

Written by: Nina Lopez-Ortiz, October 28th 2010

With Friends Like These

caitlin — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Sally Koslow

Ballantine Books

Sally Koslow’s With Friends Like These is mostly predictable. The main characters—a group of four women who are each others’ best friends—are often caricatures, and there is nothing terribly new or innovative about the story. Still, I didn’t dislike the book (except for the ending, which was terribly trite) and may even read it again.

Why, you may ask, would I reread a book I just called trite and predictable? What Koslow's book does manage to show, if imperfectly, and not always believably, is a group of girlfriends who forge friendships that span young adulthood to real grown-up-hood. Moreover, these women hurt each other. They fail to respond to each others’ needs. They mess up. They even have a hard time forgiving one another.

We need more stories about friendships that are imperfect, that do not meet all of our needs all the time, and that grow and wane and shift and stretch and learn to accommodate. As girls and women, we need stories about friendships with women that are resilient enough to bear criticism, pain, and cruelty—as well as happiness, praise, and kindness. Although Koslow’s characters sometimes appear to have been pulled from some bin of clichés, Koslow does not shy away from depicting anger, disappointment, hurt feelings, and grudge-holding. Although the ending is too neat and slightly purple, the mere fact that Koslow points to reconciliations that do not depend upon forgetting a hurtful past should earn her points for trying.

As feminists, and inheritors to pro-woman social action, it can be very difficult for women to develop healthy ways of being critical of one another. Being critical of women is often (mis)interpreted as not supporting women, as not supporting women’s choices, as being anti-woman, anti-feminist, or anti-equality. It can be easier to quietly drop a friendship than to tell a friend, “You really screwed things up between us and I am really, really angry and hurt by your actions.” Telling a woman she’s screwed up doesn’t fit into certain conceptions of feminism (as I am learning), or perhaps it is better to say that it rests in a panicked tension with certain conceptions of feminism.

This is why I enjoyed With Friends Like These. It shows women who aren’t afraid to screw up, who are afraid to admit they’ve screwed up, who are held responsible but don’t want to be held responsible, and who eventually learn that being a grown-up and being a real friend both entail confidence, vulnerability, humility, and compromise. I hope that one day I can have friends as “fake” as these—who will tell me I messed up when I mess up and who will, eventually, love me anyway.

Written by: kristina grob, October 21st 2010

Amandine

gita — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Marlena de Blasi

Ballantine Books

Set in 1930s and ‘40s in France and Poland, Amandine is Marlena de Blasi’s first work of fiction. The title character is a girl without a history. Or, at least, a history she knows. When she was just five months old, a mysterious woman deposited her in a French convent with Solange, a lay sister. Mater Paul, the head nun there, was given directions never to tell anyone claiming to be from the child’s past anything about the child, or to tell the child anything about her past or heritage, even what little that she knew. When the mysterious woman left her at the convent, the child didn’t even have a name.

Solange names the child Amandine. Although Amandine has a defective heart and is not expected to live very long, she survives, and Solange virtually never leaves her side. They live in the convent in France until Amandine is almost ten. Mater Paul has been barely hospitable during this time and, after one of the other nuns starves Amandine almost to death in a misguided attempt to protect Mater Paul, Solange and her young charge decide to leave the convent and travel to Solange’s mother’s farm in northern France. Just before they board the first train, they find out France has offered a complete surrender to Nazi Germany. Amandine spends the rest of the novel trying to reach Solange’s family.

In the meantime, Amandine’s mother finds out that her daughter, who she thought had died as an infant, is still alive. The major subplot of the story, then, is her search for her daughter amidst the chaos that was ensuing in Europe during World War II.

In reading Amandine, I found a few things distracting. First, it’s written in present tense, which is extremely difficult to write well. In this case, unfortunately, it’s more irritating than anything else.

Second, it is mostly in third person, but switches to first person perspective inexplicably two-thirds of the way into the story and switches back to third person less than thirty pages later. When I got to that part, I had to go back to make sure the perspective really had changed, and this took me out of the narrative.

Third, entire sections of many of the chapters are a single character's thoughts. While I don’t mind reading a main character’s internal dialog every now and then, especially when the character is the one narrating the story, reading pages upon pages of italics (which indicate thoughts) is a huge turn off for me. Not only that, the various thoughts are not just from one character but many characters, which makes it more difficult to keep straight without rereading earlier chapters.

Honestly, this was an okay novel; it wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible, either. After I got past the three major detractors, Amandine kept my attention well. There’s just enough background on the war to ground the novel, but not so much that the reader is overwhelmed, with only one exception: at one point—a few SS soldiers kill one of the major characters, though there’s barely any foreshadowing to speak of. On one page, the character is alive, and on the next, dead. This speaks to the seriousness of war even for people who have not been directly affected by it.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, October 8th 2010

The Passage

admin — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Justin Cronin

Ballantine Books

Trying to explain The Passage is like explaining Lost or the Harry Potter series to an outsider. You end up having to sum it up in the simplest terms: Lost is about people stuck on a really weird island, Harry Potter is about a boy defeating evil wizards, and The Passage is about a little girl trying to save the world. Since this is a review, I’ll go a bit deeper than that, but it might sound ridiculous, so bear with me.

The Passage starts with a military experiment gone wrong. This experiment created beings that resemble vampires (don’t go out during the day, don’t age, feed on humans, etc.), and they have escaped. There’s a little girl, Amy, who was also a subject in the experiment, but who fared better than the others because she retained some of her humanity. The creatures are killing most of the U.S. population, and a man helps Amy escape. We jump forward a hundred years to a small settlement of survivors still trying to protect themselves against these creatures. It’s up to them and Amy to save what’s left of the country, perhaps the world.

No pat description can really do this book justice. The first part could have been a novel all on its own, and it probably would have been one of my favorites if it ended there. But as I kept reading, the storyline, character development, suspense, and surprises made the book unforgettable. Beyond that, there was the strength of the female characters, the significance of race—or lack thereof—in a society that believes they’re the last humans left, and the contemplation of how we pass down our history and what it means to future generations. All of this took me away from any traditional idea of sci-fi, fantasy, or trendy vampire lit to a look at what our culture is and what it could be.

I’ve read through negative reviews of this book, and while I can understand where others are coming from, I don’t agree. The biggest complaint I’ve read is that the book ends abruptly. That’s because this is the first book of three, and there’s more of this story to tell. Even then, The Passage easily stands alone because the first journey is complete by the end.

Another complaint is that while the first part of the book is beautifully written, it stumbles a bit after that. I agree that the first part is written much better than the rest, but it’s something I didn’t worry about as I let myself get into the story rather than focusing on the writing. After a hundred pages or so (a drop in the bucket for a book over 700 pages long), the story and the suspense carried me through to the end.

The best way I can sell this book is to admit that I could not put it down. Even when the story started to slow, even when I found myself awake at three o'clock in the morning with my fiancé groaning that I wasn’t asleep, even when I should have been eating food rather than words during my lunch break, I kept reading. It was hard to leave that world, even for a few hours. I finished all 700+ pages of The Passage in a week, and my only regret is not savoring it more.

I hope you aren’t intimidated by the page count, and I hope you’re not put off by the negative reviews, because this may end up being one of the best books you’ve read in a long time.

Written by: frau sally benz, August 14th 2010

Captive Queen: A Novel of Eleanor of Aquitaine

admin — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Alison Weir

Ballantine Books

Alison Weir is first a historian, and it shows in Captive Queen. She studied Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1970s and 1990s and realized one day that “the nature of medieval biography, particularly of women, is the piecing together of fragments of information and making sense of them. It can be a frustrating task, as there are often gaps that you know you can never fill.”

Captive Queen explores Eleanor’s life from just before her marriage to Henry FitzEmpress (later Henry II, King of England) until just after Henry’s death in 1189. There is also an epilogue that covers her death in 1204. At the beginning, there’s a map of lower England and Aquitaine, Normandy, Brittany, and France, which are all parts of present-day France. Also included is a helpful flowchart of Eleanor and Henry’s genealogy, which I referred to numerous times when I was trying to remember minor characters.

The novel itself is split into five parts, each representing a stage in Eleanor’s life and marriage to Henry. The first part is a rosy depiction of Eleanor’s early life with Henry. At the time of their wedding, he was eighteen and she was twenty-nine and already had two daughters. They were married just two months after the annulment of her marriage to the King of France, Louis VII. Eleanor’s marriage to King Henry was tumultuous: she fought with Henry often about his rule of her lands. At the same time, however, it was steamy; it wasn’t even twenty pages in before the first bedroom scene occurs. Still, it’s clear she wanted a partnership of equals, not a man to rule over her as husband and lord, which was the norm at the time, especially for women in royalty.

The following four parts accentuate her desire to be included in affairs of state, rule her lands equitably, and be treated as more than “the wife of King Henry and mother of his children.” The second part covers her apparent rivalry with Thomas Becket. In the third part, Weir writes about Eleanor and Henry’s sons: Young Henry, Richard (who would become Richard the Lionheart), Geoffrey, and John (later to become King John, best known for signing the Magna Carta and for being a primary antagonist in most Robin Hood legends).

After encouraging her sons to rebel (unsuccessfully) against their father, Henry placed Eleanor under house arrest for more than fifteen years, most notably in Sarum, Wiltshire (the earliest settlement of present-day Salisbury, England). There, she received very little news from outside the confines of her imprisonment but was finally freed upon Henry’s death in 1189. In the novel, she says to her gaoler, “Master Berneval, I command you, in the name of King Richard, to set me at liberty at once.” And he does.

Two things irked me about Captive Queen, and neither are the author’s fault. The first is Henry’s repeated insistence (and everyone else’s assumption) that women are meant to be child-bearers and nothing more. Eleanor herself even notes that she is most proud of her daughters when they produce children—hopefully sons—for their husbands. The second is that Eleanor’s life revolves around the men in it, no matter how much she wants to rule her lands herself or how intelligent and magnanimous she is in acting as Henry’s regent. The first thing is the unfortunate sexist reality Eleanor had to deal with during her lifetime. The second is related; Weir’s frustration at being able to find only a very few fragments of Eleanor’s life basically forced her to study the men surrounding Eleanor and often make conjectures about her based on what was written about them.

It’s clear in reading that Alison Weir did a lot of research before penning Captive Queen as a fiction. After all, she writes, “What is the point of a historical novel... based on a real person if the author does not take pains to make it authentic as possible?” For fans of medieval Europe, this book is a must read. Just beware that the author made it as authentic as possible, right down to the sexism of the time period.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, July 18th 2010

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

admin — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 03:15:00 +0000

By Jamie Ford

Ballantine Books

Some of the best American literature tells the story of the immigrant experience. Numerous writers have written about the sense of loss both material and psychological that comes with leaving your country and everything that is familiar to start a new life. Many of the characters in these novels never seem completely at home in their new land, but they soldier on for economic reasons, or because they’re committed to making a life in this new world

Equally compelling is the story of first-generation Americans who have one foot in the modern world and one foot in the past. Henry, the protagonist and narrator of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is first introduced to us as a fifty-six-year old man who has recently lost his wife to cancer after caring for her for seven years. Henry has taken early retirement from his job at Boeing Field to care for his wife, Ethel, and now his life seems empty and purposeless. His college aged son disapproved of his decision to care for his wife at home rather than placing her in a nursing home that would have provided round-the-clock professional care givers and is emotionally distant from him, and Henry seems alone and disconnected in the world.

Henry, who is Chinese American finds himself pulled back into the past when he walks past a large crowd that is gathered at the Panama Hotel in what used to be known as Nihonmachi or Japantown. In the midst of a major renovation of the hotel, the belongings of twenty-seven Japanese families presumably interned during World War II have been discovered in the basement of the hotel. Until this time, Henry has managed to keep the memories of that difficult time at bay, but the discovery of these treasures leads him to begin searching for a rare jazz record that also symbolizes a lost childhood love.

As the novel effortlessly moves between the narrative voices of the older Henry and twelve-year-old Henry who came of age during World War II, we learn what life was like for a young Chinese American boy growing up in Chinatown. Henry’s father is a nationalist who hates the Japanese for their aggressive military incursions into China and is a respected elder member of an association in Chinatown that is actively supporting the war effort in China. Because he wants his son to become fully Americanized, Henry can speak only English at home although his parents can barely understand him. Henry also has to wear a “I am Chinese” button whenever he leaves the house so he won’t be taken for being Japanese. Henry looks Chinese, but thinks like an American, which only leads to a sense of double isolation. He is literally isolated from his parents because they won’t let him converse with them in their native language and he feels isolated at the all Caucasian school where he is “scholarshipping” because the children taunt him for looking different.

Enter Keiko, a Japanese American girl who begins scholarshipping at the school. Henry and Keiko have an almost instant bond. Suddenly, working in the cafeteria and serving meals to his fellow classmates isn’t such a trial. Henry’s parents don’t approve of his friendship with Keiko—in his father’s eyes, Henry is a traitor for befriending the enemy. Henry finds a welcome ally in his friendship with Sheldon, a saxophone player and street performer who Henry gives his lunch to every day on the way to school. In the midst of all of this, all persons of Japanese origin (including American citizens) are evacuated to internment camps and Keiko’s family is eventually relocated to a camp in Idaho.

Once I started reading this book, I found myself pulled into the story and the historical details of these events that are often glossed over in historical accounts. The author writes compassionately about the experiences of Japanese families during this time. His vivid descriptions of Japantown and Chinatown transport the reader back in time to a difficult period in American history. Henry’s lifelong friendship with Sheldon and his love of jazz are a continuous thread in the novel along with Henry’s undying love for Keiko. I especially liked the characters of Sheldon and Mrs. Beatty, the woman who manages the school cafeteria and becomes an unlikely friend to Henry. Does Henry find Keiko after all the years of separation? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

Written by: Gita Tewari, February 5th 2010

The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn

admin — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Alison Weir

Ballantine Books

Having been drawn to the history of midwifery and peasants/working classes, I’ve always shied away from studying aristocrats. When I first picked up The Lady in the Tower, I was a bit apprehensive. Over 350 pages in length (not including the bibliography, source notes, or illustrations), it appeared to be a daunting reading task. Despite my worries, the work turned out to be thoroughly engaging and interesting.

From Anne Boleyn to Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, Alison Weir examines the medieval context that they existed in, handing over no prejudices, just facts (as well as omitted evidence). Whether Anne slept with five men behind Henry’s back, well, that is for the reader to interpret. Contrary to popular knowledge, Weir states that Henry was not behind Anne’s fall, since he clearly could have done away with her as he did his previous queen, Katherine.

On top of all the primary source investigation, Weir utilizes a historical methodology which covers interpretations in different eras down through the ages. She explains that yes, the masses saw Anne in a better light during her daughter Elizabeth I’s reign. Later in the Victorian era Anne’s image was romanticized, so Weir effectively notes the easy sway of public opinion.

Today, however, Weir observes past records and argues that it was near impossible for a queen in Anne’s time to find the privacy to take up with five different lovers (including her own brother). The role of modern science explains issues like miscarriages and Katherine’s death (cancer), which the superstitious and god-fearing people of sixteenth century England were not privy to. Weir’s work incorporates archaeological examination of the burial area where Anne’s beheaded body was approximately laid to rest.

Weir does a great job of keeping the context in focus, while keeping the narrative compelling. The only disappointment of the book, as an advance copy, was that the illustrations were not included. The only historical figure that I could not muster sympathy for was Thomas Cromwell (the man who spearheaded the king's disposal of Anne, and who also later faced his own execution), but don’t let me be the judge or hand-picked jury on the final verdict of Cromwell’s character.

This account of the Tudors has really piqued my curiosity to go beyond the surface of the occasional pedigree chart or Hollywood movie for Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII came alive in the pages.

Written by: Nicolette Westfall, January 16th 2010

Self Storage

admin — Fri, 18 May 2007 18:51:00 +0000

By Gayle Brandeis

Ballantine Books

Flan Parker makes money off of other people’s lost stuff. With her husband passively working on his thesis and two children to support, Flan makes money off the contents of unpaid-for storage units that she bids on. Before selling her spoils, Flan vicariously lives through the contents of each box as a reprieve from her own routine life.

Although there are worse mates out there, Flan feels somewhat alone in her marriage as her husband, Shae, atrophies on the couch “researching” his thesis. Tables turn, however, when an Afghani woman accidentally hits Flan’s youngest child with a car. Shae becomes the full-time nurturer for their daughter while Flan can barely step foot in the hospital.

This accident raises many issues for Flan – what kind of mother she is, how to help the Afghani woman (who is being demonized by the community and fears being sent back to Afghanistan), and what to do about the lack of her relationship with her father. Her guides through this are her cherished copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and a single box found in a storage unit that contains a scrap of paper with the word “yes” on it. Flan is inspired to live by following what makes her say “yes” inside and by celebrating herself, her family and life.

What Flan finds by the end of Self Storage is not any extra insight to life’s secrets, but access to an inner compass to navigate her way through this world. Brandeis hasn't written a typical post-9/11 novel filled with rhetoric and assumptions. Instead, she presents something that we need more of today - a willingness to try to understand those who are different than us and a commitment to doing what's right. It's a book worth checking out just for its hopefulness.

Written by: Beverly Jenkins-Crockett, May 18th 2007