Muriellerites

The Stone Angel is Margaret Laurence’s first novel in her Manawaka series. It is a touching story of Hagar Shipley’s reflections of her journey trying to gain independence and respect in a small Canadian prairie town. Now a woman in her nineties living with her son Marvin and his wife Doris, she is still as querulous and proud as she was as a young woman. She struggles with the inevitable physical ravages of old age, of her life-long pride that never allowed her to open herself to anyone. She rebels against her strict, judgemental parent who only believed in ‘hard work’ and ‘tough love’, yet she herself becomes just as demanding and disapproving with her husband and two sons. She realizes at the end of her life that she has made mistakes and hurt the people she loved the most. It is at her weakest hour that that she reaches out to the son who has always been there for her regardless of how she ignored him. When he refers to her as ‘a holy terror’, she ‘feels like it is more than’ she ‘could now reasonably have expected out of life, for he has spoken with such anger and such tenderness.’

The Stone Angel is a significant work of masterful prose and unforgettable characters. After reading this ... you will never again visit a home for the elderly without thinking of the anguish of Hagar Shipley.

This wonderfully diverse collection of novels will certainly please the reader in you. What better way to discover the great new writing styles and popular writing genres of the Indie literary world?

For the readers of young adult books, Brandt Leggs’s, fantasy thriller OUTVIEW, will keep you on the edge of your seat. In, AMONG THE SHROUDED, Amalie Jahn tackles an important issue with her gripping story dealing with human trafficking.

Crime fiction lovers will be pleased to see action-packed BROKEN ANGELS, by S.W. Vaughn among the great discoveries found here.

Lovers of romance, get ready for James DiBenedetto’s, DREAM STUDENT, about a girl who finds herself tangled in other people’s dreams. Suzanne Jenkins’ first book in her adult romance novel series, PAM OF BABYLON, will get you hooked and wanting to read her 8 other books.

Fans of Biblical literature will be pleasantly surprised to find Uvi Posnansky’s beautifully written tale, RISE TO POWER, standing proud among the other nine books in this great collection.

The historical fiction genre is well represented with one of my favourites, THE LUCK OF THE WEISSENSTEINERS, Christoph Fischer’s profound

and momentous novel about the anti-Semitic atrocities of WW1.

The well-fleshed characters and intriguing plots of P.C. Zicks’s, NATIVE LANDS, Janet Morris’, TEMPUS, and Aaron Paul Lazar’s, DOUBLE FORTÉ, will make you want to read more of these terrific writers. Highly recommended read!

TALES TO COUNT ON, is S.R. Mallery's second collection of thought-provoking short stories, and it certainly doesn't disappoint. She ‘s chosen the unifying theme of ‘word count’—a major consideration and an absolutely deciding factor in many aspects of a writer’s journey. The stories are arranged—almost like in a family album—from the shortest (flash fiction) to the longest (short story), and seem to parallel the emotional evolution of the writing process. The first outbursts are short and crisp, almost timid, and progress slowly in word count to a final full-blown roar. The stories chronicle the different stages of women’s struggle to assert her place in a patriarchal society—“open windows to the souls of women crying out for help.”
From flash fiction to the longer contemporary and historical form, her stories will touch you in a way that only great writing can.

Isabel Allende has written a momentous work with her novel, The House of the Spirits. This magical novel is about mental and physical oppression in all forms whether it be a marriage, a love relationship, or at the hands of a political dictatorship. The author depicts man’s propensity for cruelty, his need for revenge to reassert his power, and his quest to impose his will via deceit and lack of compassion for the weak. But Allendes’s male characters are not all despots. The patriarch of this Trueba family saga, Esteban, has fathered a son whose sole goal in life is help the poor and needy with his medical skills. His daughter and granddaughter are passionately linked to men who fight for freedom and justice for the lower classes of society.

What you won’t find in this book are women who share the same cruel tendencies as her male characters. They are all compassionate, industrious, generous, and willing to forgive all the evil happening around them—even Esteban’s favourite prostitute becomes a charitable business woman who willingly helps out her old friends. Allende’s ultimate message—that the days of despots ‘are numbered, because they have not been able to destroy the spirit of these women’—is an honourable one, but has in turn sacrificed the roundedness of her characters.

A profound, and thought-provoking read.

Rereading, John Steinbeck’s short novel, Of Mice and Men, is like revisiting a master at work. The opening scene presents the two characters in an idyllic backdrop of nature beside the Salinas River: George, a simple migrant worker, with his protégé, Lennie, strong and built like a bull, but with the mind of a four year old. This is a privileged glimpse of the two simple characters as they relax and talk of their dream of buying a small house on an acre of land with their earnings on a job they’re going to in the Salinas Valley. The characterization is powerful; within a page or two of dialogue, George and Lennie become full-fleshed characters ready to confront the real dog eat dog world at the ranch. Steinbeck gives us a harsh portrait where the mentally and physically challenged are bullied and exploited; where women are sexual objects, and tough love is a way of life. The weak and sickly are cast aside in this world—survival of the fittest is the way to go.

Plot and imagery are tightly woven as the characters lead us to the inevitable ending. Just as Candy, the elderly workhand, regrets not having the courage to do the right thing by his dying dog, George must take a similar stand with Lennie.

A touching story told in a masterful voice.

In Arthur Golden’s novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, we are presented a captivating part of Japanese culture. The story is told as the memoir of an elderly woman who has devoted her entire life to being a successful geisha. We first see her as a poor peasant girl, Chiyo, who is sold by her father into slavery. She will spend her entire youth learning how to please and entertain rich, older men. Sexual exploitation of the young girl is an integral part of her training. Appearances are paramount in her trade, so she must learn to camouflage her true self behind thick make-up, sculptured hair, and beautiful silk kimonos as Sayuri the geisha.

The young peasant girl, Chiyo, seemed more real to me than the older version of herself as a successful geisha. But then, being real would not make Sayuri a good geisha. Certainly an interesting  historical read.

Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient, is rendered in a lyrical style that will transport you back and forth from a bombed villa in Tuscany, to the blinding sands of the North African desert, to war time England, and the vibrant era of pre-war Cairo. Told in the multiple points of views of a Canadian nurse, a Sikh sapper, an Italian thief, and faceless, burned Englishman, it breaks most traditional literary conventions, yet it is done with brilliant mastery.

The horrors of war has made the characters reticent to reveal all the details of their past lives. Bits and pieces about themselves are presented cautiously. Sometimes the stories are coloured with the haze of wine or shots of morphine—to reveal too much is to make them vulnerable—not a safe position to be in times of war.

This is certainly an important, historical book about the physical and emotional ravages of war, and proof that no one comes out of these horrific times unscathed.

Markus Zusak’s historical novel, The Book Thief, is a heart-wrenching rendition of a sad and shameful era in human history. It’s the story a young German girl, Liesel, who discovers the power of the written word. She first becomes a book thief on the same day her brother dies and her mother hands her over to foster care. While her mother desperately searches for help to bury her child, Liesel discovers a book hidden in the snow: The Grave Digger’s Handbook. She can’t read yet, but she picks it up, and her journey as a book thief begins. This book will shape her destiny.

The imagery used to depict the pain and degradation experienced by the Jewish people in wartime Germany is so vivid and stark it will leave you shaken. The discovery of the power of the written word brings joy and a sense of purpose to Liesel’s impoverished world, but she will soon be slapped with the flip side, where words have the power to bring only pain and destruction.

Highly recommended. This book cannot leave you untouched.

My son steps into my office on his way to the fridge—his favourite electrical appliance—and looks at me slouched, as always, in front of my computer. It’s where he usually finds me before he leaves for work in the morning, or when he stumbles home late at night, unless, of course, I’m tangled tightly in the arms of a good book. I feel him hesitate beside me and I look up. He’s staring at the jumble of words on the screen lassoed between groups of periods and commas. His words aren’t posted for the whole world to see like mine are, but lurk in the dark corridors and crevasses within him, waiting for the right moment to break out and be heard.

I turn in my seat and brace myself for what’s troubling him. It’s not his fault his mother decided to become a writer—although I’m not sure it was a conscious decision on my part—maybe it was a done deal before I was even born. But I sure had a say at being his mother, and I’ve done my best to do good by that.

He shrugs and cocks his head towards the screen in front of me. “Why do you do it, Mom?” Why indeed. Why don’t I spend my retirement years watching my favourite shows, reading books, golfing, going on cruises to warmer countries, even knitting scarves for the homeless? He knows it’s not for the money; we all had a good laugh when I received my first $0.25 royalty check from Amazon.

He’s left me speechless. I wasn’t expecting to put a label to it. Maybe he’s questioning his own reason for things and wants me to show him how. Thing is, I don’t have an answer, and after a short pause, he turns to leave. “Sorry for bothering you, Mom.”

It’s only after I hear his bedroom door close that it comes to me. I do it to give back and share all the joy and soul-searching that reading has given me all my life. Some books have turned my head right around, others have made me cry, and some have showed me the way. I write, not for fame and glory, but to maybe give someone the necessary will to go on—be it a child being bullied or abused, or even a homeless person finding a life-changing book in a garbage bin—and to help them see how important their link is in that tight chain we call humankind.

THE DIVINERS, Margaret Laurence’s sequel to her Manawaka novels, is a raw Canadian journey into the feminist movement of the seventies. Morag Gunn is an independent, powerful character who refuses to be dictated to by the rigid, and often cruel expectations of her times. Told through the eyes of a middle-aged writer trying to come to terms with her teenaged daughter, the younger, orphaned Morag is revealed through a slideshow of memory blurbs that bring the character alive—almost like leafing through a photo album of the character’s life. She is a woman that has never tolerated being told what to do, and must fight her motherly instinct of trying to protect her daughter from the pain that is an essential part of growth. Love plays a powerful role in this honest story of the loneliness that comes with stepping out of the box and following your dream.

John Green’s young adult novel, The Fault in Our Stars, is basically a story about teens battling cancer. The elements of a love story come to the front when Hazel and Augustus fall in love after meeting up in a Support Group for cancer patients. Both of them are super intelligent and highly loquacious (as most of John Green’s teens appear to be), so we’re privy to a lot of philosophical jargon and literary quotes throughout the story.

Hazel is a sweet kid who hates being singled out because of her cancer, but her disease is fundamentally her parents’ raison d’être (typical of most parents), and because of her special needs, her social, and possibly her emotional, freedoms are compromised.

This story is not for the faint of heart. All aspects of the story revolve around the terrible ravages of the disease, and at some point the tone is almost unbearable. No one wants to witness pain and despair, especially in children; so be prepared .

     It doesn’t happen often that a character pulls at my emotions as much as John Williams, Stoner did. The ending was so painful I had to close the book before it was finished, and come back to it a few days later to give Stoner a proper goodbye.

This is fundamentally a story about the cost of love and the sacrifices and compromises involved. It is about a young man from a hard-working farming family who enrols in an agricultural college program only to fall in love with literature. He must leave his farming world to embrace his new love. He falls in love with the image of a gentle girl and ends up in a loveless marriage. His career as an English professor is stunted when he can’t embrace the politics of the university.

Stoner is an ordinary man trying to confront the caprices of love. At the death of his father, he ponders whether life is worth living.

            “He thought of the cost exacted, year after year, by the soil: and it remained as it had been— ... Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in cheerless labour, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed.”

As he reflects about how fruitless his father’s life had been, Stoner himself thinks back about all his years of joyless teaching. It is only when he defies the status quo and brings his love of literature into his teaching methods that he feels the spring come back in his step. His dying reflections about his life comes with a crucial question— “What did you expect?”—which left me asking the very same thing.

   A profound and essential read!

Although published more than 100 years ago, H. G. Wells' science fiction novel, The Time Machine, is still as thought-provoking and engrossing as it was then.The idea of time- travel was, and still is today, a controversial subject. We all participate inadvertently on a regular basis in some form of time-travel, whether it be our mind constantly flashing back to something that happened in the past, or when we visit a strange, futuristic place in our dreams. But the actual physical aspect of saddling ourselves in a real time machine where we can direct our travels back to an ancient era, or bolt onwards towards the unknown future, remains intriguing to all of us.

The attraction of  time-travel wasn't the clincher for me; it was more the Time Traveller's assessment of the political and social aspects of the futuristic society he has discovered. He escapes a rather limited and narrow-minded society when he steps into his time machine to explore the unknown future. What kind of state will he find his future fellow humans to be in? Will this future version of his fellow man be intellectually and morally advanced, or will he find a regressed and decadent society? I confess my disappointment that the story ended as it did -- I wanted so much to sit by the fire as the Time Traveller told us what else he has discovered; perhaps I expected he would give me hope that we're going about the right way towards establishing a just society.

Please don't buy your child a pet turtle for Christmas. It'll be stuck in a tiny aquarium all its life. Your child will always forget to take care of it and you'll be stuck with it for forty years. Turtles aren't decorations; they're majestic animals that deserve to be free.

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There is a valuable lesson for young and old in Mrs. D's children's book, Runaway Clothes. A young child wakes up to a closet empty of all her clothes. The hangers are upset with the way she disrespects her clothes by not putting them away where they belong, and they stage a walk-out.This makes the child think of her how she also treats her toys the same way, and she begins to see things differently. This is a colourful presentation of our affluent society and how little we appreciate what we have. The illustrations are wonderful, and will certainly be a pleaser with  the young reader.

Mrs. D is true to her style in her latest children's book, The Royal Palm. A beautiful palm tree grows up vain and disagreeable on a small island filled with a family of ordinary-looking trees. All effort of friendship is snubbed by her. A major storm hits the island and the vain palm tree tries to fight it off by herself. The plain trees feel sorry for her and they save her from being carried off into the raging sea.
The illustrations by Chanoa are splendid and are a great boost to the story. Recommended for read-aloud activities for very young readers.