The Thirteenth Tale

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

It has been quite awhile since I've been inspired to write a book review, but this lovely gothic piece, first by this author, certainly deserves some attention.  I was immediately lost in the wonder of this story.

This is the story of two women, both reclusive in their own ways,  who are brought together by story.  The story of the older woman, a powerful writer who as hidden the details of her life from the world.  Now she wants to tell the truth, to a young woman who has no idea that she, too, has a story.

As a Southerner, I know the importance of story, and I deeply identified with the power of this idea.  The novel is well-written, captivating and elusive as the heroine weaves the threads of the story together.  Along the way she discovers  the power of her own story and the ability of the story to change the world.  Throughout the novel plays a haunting atmosphere of musty bookstores, ancient libraries and the wonder of the word.

I was a tiny bit disappointed in the ending, although I really didn't expect how everything would play out.  Things were maybe a little too tidily wrapped up, but all and all this is a lovely book, well worth curling up with in the big old chair on a rainy, cold or snow day.  

Cane River

Cane River by Lalita Tademy
Warner Books, 2001


I come from two long lines of strong women. They survived the hard life of settling in the mountains of Southwest Virginia, the pain and loss of childbirth, disease, economic hardship, the Depression, the helplessness of dealing with alcoholism and many other tragedies and difficulties of life. But none of them, to my knowledge, had to suffer the indignities of slavery. Lalita Tademy's book, Cane River, tells in fictional form the stories of four generations of the women in her family.

The story, focusing on the women that raised children, mostly by white men, in rural Louisiana during the years before the Civil War and into the 1930s, brings home the true tragedies of slavery. The first woman of the family to come to Cane River was Elizabeth, torn from her two children in Virginia and shipped South, still a slave with no control over her fate or the fates of her children. Generation after generation struggle with the truth of being of dark skin in the South, as her daughters and granddaughters bear children to white plantation owners against their will, finally using the desires of these white men against them to better the lives of their children.

The great tragedy for me in this book was that these wonderful women, each beautiful and strong, was unable to realize the glory of their color. Being dark was a burden, and lightening the skin of the next generation became an unacknowledged goal for Suzette, Philomene and Emily as they fought for security in white society for their children. Being able to "pass" as white made life easier, but the resentment that built up in the community against the white men who lived openly and acknowledged their children by these black women shattered lives. Tademy's search for her heritage began in a resentment against the attitudes of the earlier generation against dark skin. What she discovered was that each generation dealt with prejudice and hardship in the only way they knew, and her respect for these women and their difficult choices becomes a wonderful story of their lives.

Although this is fiction, there is a lot of truth in this portrayal. The story doesn't end with a "happy ever after", and it sometimes seems to me that the struggle is still as hard as ever. It's long past time that we learned lessons from our tragic history.

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Black Swan Green

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, Random House, 2007

Most of the books I read about English life are either written or set in the peaceful English countryside of the past centuries. Black Swan Green is also set in the English countryside, but in a modern world that is far from peaceful.

Jason Taylor is a poet that is afraid of being bullied if his peers find out that he writes, and a regular thirteen-year-old boy facing the usual perils of adolescence. He lives in an ordinary housing development near a sleepy village, but in the thirteen months of his life explored in this book, he discovers that things are not nearly as ordinary in Black Swan Green as they seem.

Jason's journey through that year of his life is a struggle with school, a stuttering handicap and bullies, and with changes in his family and in himself. These are the usual rites of passage that might happen to any boy, but in Mitchell's novel the common moves along with the uncommon, as a ghostly playmate helps set the theme for the coming chapters. Jason wanders from the ordinary world of his affluent housing development into a stranger, older England, with strange mysteries and even stranger people. But even as Jason discovers a wider, mystical country alongside his own modern world, the common transforms the fantasy, and is transformed as well.

Ghosts often haunt David Mitchell's books, but the ghosts in Black Swan Green are more elusive than usual. The modern mind seems to shun mystery, creating an ordinary world out of the routine of daily life. Mitchell captures the glimpses of the extraordinary that exist alongside the common, with a beautifully written story of one young life in rural Worcestershire.

Buy this book from Greenberry House.

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Gap Creek

Gap Creek by Robert Morgan, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1999

I had read this once before, but when it showed up in the astonsihing stack of books my aunt sent me recently I thought it was time for another visit with the Richards family down in the valley. The theme I liked the most in this books is that it doesn't seem to be a good idea for mountain folk to leave the mountains; that's just asking for trouble.

And trouble is just what Julie and Hank get when they move down on Gap Creek so Hank can go to work at a job nearby. Julie, newly married with the secret hope that her days of hard work are done, finds herself working just as hard to keep house for her landlord and new husband. Their trials really begin at hog killing time, and things just get worse and worse as the young couple struggles to deal with fire, flood, famine and a difficult mother-in-law.

Told from the point of view of Julie, I sometimes thought the characterization of Hank and the others in the book was a little sketchy. But then I realized that Julie told her story like a mountain woman would tell it. If my grandmother had ever really sat down and told the story of her life, it would have read very much like the story of Julie and Hank. Not so much tragedy, of course, but it would have been about trouble and working and family. And Grandma would have told it like Julie did, with not so much emphasis of how and why this happened; she would have just said it happened this way.

Reading between the lines is required more with this book than with many others, but there is a sublte Appalachian realism here. Mountain people don't go in for introspection and emotion, really. Perhaps the book would have been stronger with less tragedy and more empathy between the characters, and more revelation about the development of some characters. But I think the author accomplished his purpose, and told "The Story of a Marriage".

The Autobiography of God

The Autobiography of God by Julius Lester, St. Martin's Griffin, 2006

Sometimes a book written as fiction plunges bravely to the heart and depth of the hardest and most complicated philosophical and theological issues. This slender volume explores the themes of faith and evil through the story of a young woman rabbi who is struggling with loneliness and a crisis of faith. When she comes into possession of a special Torah, her life is changed radically, and she must face the truth, about herself and about God.

The quietly mystical search that Rebecca experiences in the first part of the book appealed to me, and I identified with her struggle with the difficult questions of life. I spent a lot of time looking up terms and exploring meanings as I read. I also made notes of some beautiful and thoughtful quotations to ponder further.

The later chapters were very different, almost shocking and certainly thought-provoking. Unexpected twists in the plot and stunning new characters are only part of the sudden change, which serves to underscore the meanings in the first part of the book and take the reader into strange new territory. The final chapter isn't a complete resolution, but it is satisfying and I won't soon forget this story.

Julius Lester has a blog called A Commonplace Book.

Buy this book from Greenberry House.

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A Fine Balance

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, Vintage International Books, 1997.

I have read a few books recently, all fiction, about India. The last was an entertaining and comic novel about a modern Indian girl's search for "a nice boy" to marry. Even though it was funny, there were some disturbing themes, in the lack of control the young woman felt regarding her life and future.

Mistry's book, also often funny but overshadowed by repeated tragedy, also brings out the theme of lack of control. The four main characters are born in different castes and in different parts of India and are all searching for better lives. They come together through strange circumstances and work together to make a future for themselves, but repeatedly their lives are shattered by events beyond their control. Government corruption is a major offender in this dark world and poverty batters the lives of all of the characters in the novel. The story is set in the mid-1970s, during the "State of Emergency".

What was appealing to me about this book was how four ordinary people somehow managed to rise above the tragedies of their individual lives and reach out to each other and to others around them, some even less fortunate than themselves. The main characters learned to respect each other despite appearances and differences, and the struggle to survive sometimes brought out the best as well as the worst in even the minor characters.

The plot is a beautifully woven tapestry of intertwined lives and loves. Occasionally the story is horrifying, then comically shattering before it soars. The truths in this novel run deep, revealing the changing attitudes toward individuality and personal worth in a culture in turmoil. The depth of the human spirit in a world made up of beggers, murderers, extortionists alongside ordinary people just trying to get by is a fascinating and rich portrait of a culture and time painted by a master.

The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones, By Alice Sebold, Little, Brown and Company, 2002.

A haunting, beautiful and often painful tale, The Lovely Bones is the story of the death, life and the mystery of both as Susie Salmon tells about what happened to her one terrible night in a corn field near her home. Her rape and murder begin a shattering journey for her family and friends that she watches from heaven. Unable to tear herself way from the bonds of love and need, Susie is helpless to influence events as grief isolates her family.

This is the second time I've read this book, and like the first time I couldn't put it down. The writer does a wonderful job of speaking for Susie, the victim of a crime that doesn't for a minute see herself as a victim. Told from a unique point of view, as Susie watches the unfolding lives of her family and friends from a gazebo in heaven, this is a unique coming-of-age tale. Filled with sadness and tragedy as the story is, hope and humor lift the story with a unique perception of what heaven might be like and with the comforting idea that those that the living have lost are just beyond our perception, behind the veil.

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I Capture the Castle

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, St. Martin's Griffin, 1998.

This book, a discovery by my aunt in Connecticut, is such a charming work that I can't understand why I never read it before. The story is quite simple with shades of Jane Austen; two poor girls with no prospects live with their eccentric parents in a rundown ruin of an English castle; then the rich neighbors move in and life is changed forever. But this little story, written from the point of view of the younger sister by way of her journal, captures more than just the castle as young Cassandra discovers life and love and the wide world beyond genteel poverty.


Although Smith's story is not meant to be challenging, I like a small section where Cassandra talks to the local vicar about religion. The vicar is more of a friend than pastor to the family; he is well-educated and one of the few people that the girls or their father know in the small village. Cassandra has realized that she is in love with her sister's fiance, and, although she doesn't know it, the vicar understands she is troubled. He tells her to "sit in an empty church. Sit, not kneel. And listen, not pray. Prayer's a very tricky business." Earlier he explained that God is "merely shorthand for where we come from, where we're going, and what it's all about."


Cassandra wrestles with a few hours of determining to "get religion" and do good works, but then she realizes that some people might use religion as a means of avoiding "life" and she knows she doesn't want to bypass the good and bad of living. The story goes on, often funny, with a gentle tragedy for young Cassandra that somehow seems it will work out right in the end. It's hard for a seventeen year old to give up on life, even with a broken heart, when she has so much interest in people and writing.