On the interminable bus journey, bound for London, Lev practices his English: ‘Excuse me for troubling you.’ Do you have anything you could give me?’ ‘I’am legal. ‘Lev home country has just entered the EU and now he, like so many others, is heading west. His wife, Marina, has died of leukemia, his five-year-old daughter, Maya, is living with her grandmother and 42-year-old Lev – a farmer lumberyard worker, now one of Eastern Europe’s long-term unemployed – is traveling to London to find work.

Grey with exhaustion, Lev arrives in a dustry, midsummer city. Hope and envy jostle within him. As he told Lydia, his companion on the journey: ‘I’m going to their country now and I’m going to make them share it with me: their infernal luck. ‘Things, however, do not start well: almost all his savings are used up on his first night in the city, spent in an Earl’s Court B & B. on his upper after only 24 hours, he gate a job delivering leaflets for a kebab shop, for which he’s paid £2 a leaflet. He sleeps on the street. Desperate,lonely and grieving, he slips into poignant, wishful dreaminess.

Bit by bit, Lev gets himself on his feet and so begins a peripatetic, somes comic, often painful, journey through London, which it really feels to be a foreigner and the rage that being dependent on other can in duce. Lev is rescued from the streets by Lydia, who is now staying in the comparative paradise of Muswell Hill with Tom, an English psychotherapist, and Tom’s girlfriend, Larissa a yoga teacher from Lev and Lydia’s country. Tremain handless this culture clash with adroitness and humor: sitting on Tom’s lavatory, Lev relieves himself “as quietly as he could. The idea the he was taking a sh-t in the flat of an English psychotherapist made him feel very mildly afraid’.

Through Lev’s eyes, we see London as the newcomer views it and it is not an attractive sight: alternately moneyed and poverty-stricken its inhabitations obsessed by status and success. As Lev’s Irish landlord Christy says, with some prescience: ‘Life’s didn’t used to be like this, but now they are. If you can’t get your ball in the back of the net, you’re no one. Which is pretty much how Lev, working as a kitchen porter, is made to feel. At Lydia’s invitation, he goes to a concert at the Festival Hall, but is force to flee when his new mobile phone goes off in the expectant silence just as the conductor, for whom Lydia is working, takes the podium. On another occasion, his girlfriend takes him to the opening night of a friend’s feted new play, only to shame Lev for leaving the price tag on his new suede jacket.

As Lev fearfully and tentatively navigates this strange new city still mourning his wife, who died at only 36, he get know other Londoners. Ahmed, is a Muslim kebab-shop owner struggling to keep his business afloat in the post-9/11 world. Christy is a divorced Irish plumber who resents his upwardly mobile ex-wife and pines for his daughter; and Sophie is a young chef with a lizard tattoo who flirts with the restaurant’s celebrity guests but fusses over elderly people on Sundays at a retirement home called Ferndale Heights. Rudy, one of the Ferndale residents, is a rich old woman whose grown children neglect her. When Lev accompanies Sophie on her visits, Rudy confides her “guilt at how useless my life has been” and share memories of the childhood in India, particularly a school pageant for the British viceroy, when she held half of the letter “O” in a welcome sign. “I sometimes think,” she confides, “that’s all your life has amounted to, Ruby Constant, being half of something.”

Lev meets other economic migrants: a Russian woman on her own path to self-reinvention, who looks “determinedly straight ahead, like a gymnast trying to balance on a beam”; a teenage Russian kitchen worker; and two Chinese field laborers, Jimmy and Sonny, who laugh as they harvest asparagus, offering living proof that you can create your own happiness, even in far-from- happy circumstances. Tremain understands there’s heroism in the everyday act of survival, and she gradually brings Lev to the point where he can see this for himself.

After sleeping under tree and behind bushes to conserve his meager store of £20 note, Lev moves into an apartment in a “street of choky little houses. Called Belisha Road,” with the lonely Irishman, Christy. He takes a bunk bed in the room Christy’s young daughter had previously Slane, to have been given a child’s room. He wasn’t too embarrassed or proud to lay his head on a pillowcase. “They both longed,” Tremain writes, “to return to a time before the people they loved most were lost.”

After Lev finds a menial job in the chic restaurant where Sophie works, he slowly moves up the chain to vegetable preparer, taking baby steps toward a career as a chef. “I should feel grateful that sawmill closed,” he tells himself. Other – wise he might have ended up like his father, “enslaved to a lumberyard until I died and to the same lunch each day, and to the snow falling and drifting, year on year, falling and drifting in the same remote and backward places”.

Curious baffled, angry honorable, rash and passionate, Lev is a tremendous creation, and to identification, although he is a 40-plus widower and father , with burdens of memory and guilt at his back, Tremain, through her Voltaire’s candied; strange, for Lev is no ingénue, nor is the interested in the strangeness of the British to an outsider.

The novel, too also skewers the character-twisting distortion of celebrity culture; the infantile greed, materialism and success-worship of so much of contemporary life. Sophie, the sassy, sexy and generous colleague in the modish kitchen of “GK Ashe” who becomes Lev’s lovers, forsakes him in the end for an up-and-coming Brit-art git, “They didn’t used to be like this, but now they are,” says Lev’s Stewart, tea-brewing Irish landlord Chrisy, about these result-fixated modern “Brits”. “If you can’t get your ball in the back of the net, you’re no one.”

The Road Home on occasion switches from sad clique to Swiftian satire. The follies of conceptual art and avant-garde drama both draw raking fire. At the Royal Court, Lev storms righteously out of the press night of a fashionable shock-fest laden with viciously-parodied scenes of cruelty and abuse: “it’s probably my age, but I just feel weary with’ “he says.

On reading a novel by Rose Tremain, one suspect that what is torture for so many writers comes naturally to her. She has written about a dozen novels, set in different eras and places. Tremain writes as effortlessly and rhythmically as she breathes, tackling the serious misery of a hidden homesickness with a light and humane touch but with a firm grasp of the day-to-day realize and a rare ability to enter into the complex emotional world of the stranger. She’s on Lev’s side. English has made him a chef, but when is gratitude ever enough to overcome the longing to go back to one’s own country? Tremain writes so beautifully about Lev’s passage from near-destitution to success that it seems perverse to complain that she hasn’t made her book uglier. If The Road Home seems a slightly idealized version of a migrant worker’s journey (half through, Lev takes to reading Hamlet), it is a version filled with emotional richness, complex sensibility and a passionate insistence on the humanity of the poor, the unattractive, the flawed and the dispossessed.

This book is available online @Amazon.

Jillian Larkin’s Vixen is the first novel in The Flapper series, a young adult series set during the Roaring Twenties. The novel is akin to the Luxe and Bright Young Things series by Anna Godbersen, and though it’s Larkin’s debut, it’s smoother and more readable than many other debuts. Considering the rise of paranormals in the young adult market, Vixen gives the impression that Larkin has downright invented the wheel. Regardless of previous work, Vixen is, at the very least a fun scandalous, page-turner.

It’s 1923, and American women have just gotten the right to vote. Booze is illegal, but speakeasies are everywhere. Dresses are short, and hairstyles even shorter. There’s a flapper on every gangster’s arm, and the new music is terrifying old people. This is the Jazz Age. Three young women and the boys who chase them are at the centre of it all in Chicago. Schoolgirl Gloria Carmody dreams of being a fierce flapper, instead of a poor little rich girl about to marry Sebastian Grey, the high-society man of every girl’s dream. She’s been sneaking off to the Green Mill, Chicago’s hottest speakeasy. Her best friend, Lorraine Dyer, is hopelessly in love with Gloria’s other best friend, Marcus. Lorraine’s desperate, jealous scheming threatens to destroy Gloria’s plans of keeping her man and her double life as a flapper all at the same time. In breezes Clara Knowles, Gloria’s sweet-as-pie cousin, who is far more of a dangerous dame than she lets on.

The fun thing about Vixen is that each chapter is a glimpse into each girl’s head. Gloria is the de-facto leader of the entire outfit, and for the first half of Vixen, it is very hard to feel too sorry for her. She comes from one of the wealthiest families in the Windy City and attends the fanciest of private schools. Her biggest problem in life is that she is bored out of her mind and – gasp – about to be married off to an even wealthier version of herself. But the one luxury in life Gloria can’t afford is love. Even the best teenagers want to be bad and for 1920s Gloria, guzzling booze, wearing way too short skirts, chopping off her hair, and dancing the Charleston to scary music with men is shock to high society. Eventually, her new double life forces Gloria to see a part of society she never even noticed, forcing her to re-evaluate the things she values in life. It’s a very subtle character arc and by Vixen’s end, you can’t help but cheer Gloria on.

Lorraine is equally rich, but it is a pity you feel for her by the end, not sympathy. Most of her troubles she’s brought on herself, though Lorraine acts like a victim. It’s Gloria’s and Clara’s fault that she can’t get Marcus. Of course, it’s nobody’s fault. Lorraine still hasn’t figured out that sometimes the object of your affection simply doesn’t care if you exist.

As for Clara Knowles, she’s the biggest mystery of all. Her parents have sent her to Chicago after she ran off to New York City to become a flapper. She’s put in charge of her cousin Gloria’s wedding, and her aunt has threatened her with reform school if she doesn’t shape up. So Clara has to play at being the good girl despite being tempted by Marcus’ charms. Which means she’s left to watch Gloria play at being a flapper, knowing that Gloria is on the same path of destruction. But exactly what Clara’s destruction is remains deliciously unclear.

Stripping down the 1920s into an enjoyable read for the young adult crowd is no easy task. There’s heavy stuff like feminism, race, and class. Tackling those subjects can lead to automatic preachiness, but Larkin has admirably packed all that density into one book. She makes all these issues centre stage at the Green Mill without ever making it obvious. What reads as a dance between races is likely more allegorical than Vixen would ever let on. Young women putting off marriage and chasing their own dreams while their mothers wither away in loveless marriages is statement enough about the changing times. But Vixen is also an irreverent send-up to Jazz Age pop culture. There’s the endlessly entertaining 1920s slang, and the swishy, fabulous outfits, which are described in stunning detail. There are references to the icons of the era: Buster Keaton and Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s better than a history lesson, and a thousand times more fun.

There are boys to die for – high-society beaus and broody bandleaders. The 1920s were fun and fabulous, but also dangerous. The gun molls were deadlier than the hired guns. Vixen’s plot reads a lot like previous 1920s series, which can be a little stale if you’re already a fan of books set in the era. But Larkin’s work is still the cat’s meow, an addictive addition to the glitzy historical Gossip Girl hybrid genre. Its sequel, Ingénue, was released recently too.

“Ye who are weary, come home.”

Home is a tender and profoundly nostalgic text about family and the passing of generations. It is set in the 1950s in the town of Gilead, Iowa, and told mainly from the point of view of Glory Boughton, a school teacher who has returned home to nurse her ailing father after her five-year-long romance has failed. She is 38 years old. Her older brother Jack, something of a renegade, shows up also. He has not been home for 20 years. Jack has a history of alcoholism and petty theft but is a charming and endearing character. Glory undertakes to please him too, and the Boughtons spend some weeks together that are written about with simplicity and extraordinary detail. Old Mr. Boughton is a Presbyterian Reverend and the text accommodates some meditations on love and death and faith.

This book has something retro about it since it is set in the fifties and centres on the problems of dealing with an alcoholic family member. Some beautiful passages evoke the prairies. Robinson writes:

The next morning Jack was out in the garden early, cutting back weeds head high, gaunt shafts of plants with masses of tiny flowers on them, dusty lavender, droning with bees. And there would be black-eyed Susan, and nettles and milkweed and jewelweed and brambles and some avid vine that wilted in sunlight and broke at the slightest touch, leaving tiny whiskers of thorn in the hand that touched it.

Robinson’s previous novel Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize. It told the story of Reverend Boughton’s neighbour John Ames and evoked the prairie town with luminous prose. These passages about the natural world of the Iowa town are some of the loveliest in the latest novel, and Robinson’s careful depiction of the relationship between the two old men is brilliantly handled. Home continues where Gilead left off, zoning in on relationships in the Boughton family and the weariness that brings wounded family members to seek out their childhood place of nurturing. Robinson says:

She felt sorry for her father, happy as he was. It was hard work talking to jack. So little in his childhood and youth could be mentioned without discomfort, his twenty-year silence was his to speak about if he chose to, but they were prepared to appreciate his discretion if any account of it might have caused more discomfort still. Then there was the question “Why are you here?” which they would never ask. Glory thought, why am I here? How cruel it would be to ask me that.

The deft touches of prairie life across the years are welcome in this tale of minute emotional crises. They help to balance the main narrative and keep the reader’s focus tuned to the suffering of the adult characters. Memories abound and are beautifully recorded. For example, Robinson writes joyously of the Gilead of old when she says:

The sky was blue, the terraced hills glittered with new corn, and the pastures the cows were standing with their calves or lying in the mingled, muddied shade of oak trees. “Well, I’d almost forgotten it all,” the old man said. “It’s good to get out of the house from time to time. Ames will enjoy it.” He talked for a while about the old Gilead. It was the smell that reminded him. There used to be chicken coops and rabbit hutches behind every house almost, and people kept milk cows, and there was enough open land right in town to be plowed with a horse or a mule and planted corn. You knew the animals around town just like you knew the children, and if some old she-goat was grazing in the flower garden, well, you knew you her and she knew you and you could just walk her home.

These passages add to the retro feel of the novel.

Robinson writes with an eye to the fine detail and her text is a pleasure to read simply for the sheer joy of the writing. However, I found the story a bit slow and repetitive and the character Jack somewhat tedious in his forever excuses and self-detracting statements. He wants to be the centre of attention always, it would seem, and speaks with his hand to his face most of the time, a gesture that gets annoying in its repetition. I believe he is intended to be an anti-hero of some proportions, but if this be the case, he is really not sufficiently interesting to pull it off.

On the other hand, Glory and her housewifely ways are always a pleasure. She cooks chicken and dumplings in order to fill the house with a familiar childhood aroma and so comfort the old father and Jack. She makes pots of coffee to warm them, and pancakes to treat them to special breakfasts. Glory is a pious woman (though she rejects the word as applied to herself), and the old Reverend will leave the house to her when he dies. Glory is surprised by this gesture, and deeply conflicted. Does she want the old house to have a place for herself that is home also to other siblings, or is she frightened to be trapped in the old house? Only the future can tell as it manifests itself.

Glory, meanwhile, is caught up in memories of the past that made the old house home. She thinks of her grandmother:

She’d eat kidney when she find it. Tongue. Mutton. In spring she’d be out in the fields, along the fences, picking dandelion greens as soon as the sun was up. She’d come in with her apron full of purslane. My mother thought it was embarrassing. She’d say, “You’d think we didn’t feed her” but she always did what she wanted to do.

The healing of these two characters in the home is the real subject of this glowing text, and if it is a bit slow and repetitive, it does not really detract from the moving aspect of the telling. This is a woman’s book, about nature of family and the healing power of love.

Marilynne Robinson has also written Housekeeping and two books of nonfiction, Mother Country and The Death of Adam. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

This book is available online @Amazon.

Undoubtedly, this book is perfect for anyone who dreams of “putting up” their favorite fruits for future use (in the kitchen). It’s arranged by season for the ‘freshest results’. For example, Spring is time for rhubarb, strawberries, apricots and other eagerly anticipated fruits inventively combined into rosemary-scented marmalades, orange-blossom jams and good old solid preserves.

Also included are marmalades of bergamot, pink grapefruit and Meyer lemons, with Saunders providing in-depth explanations and many recipe variations, including information on rare as well as common fruits.

This cookbook is available online @Amazon.

After the inquired Christian confesses his secret wedding to his childhood friend and heads off to Yorshire to find out if his wife is dead and if his marriage is legal. At the same time, Caro Hill wants to make sure that her husband died overseas in battle before she marries Sir Eyam Colne. When Christian Hill – who Caro doesn’t recognize – shows up and starts asking for her, Caro, terrified that her secret will come out, disguises herself as a maid. She is a wealthy heiress and doesn’t want her husband, or his relatives, to take her wealth and property. In the Georgian era a man had complete authority over his wife’s possession, but Caro wants to avoid this at costs. She disguises herself as Kat Hunter, a woman with a sick husband. Both Caro and Christian are the two embark on a journey through Yorkshire, Caro reluctantly deserts Christian along the way, and he is determined to find her.

The Secret Wedding is plagued by one of the major problems of romance novels. The heroine, despite her self-reliance and strong will, is unlikeable. When Christian Hill saves her from an aver mob after she is wrongly accused of theft, her from response is extreme ingratitude. She is scornful, insulting hypocritical. After unbelievably falling into bed with Christian, after a single flirtatious conversation she judges the questionable choices of the people around her. She condemns what she as a scandalous London, after behaving scandalously her.

While the novel’s heroine is insufferable, its hero is much easier to fall in love with. Christian Hill has a title, but he is relatively poor, especially in comparison to Caro. He earns a living wage from his life as a soldier. He rescues Caro twice, even if it means certain danger to him. He is even willing to take care of the wife he doesn’t know and doesn’t want. Despite his willingness to help strangers, he feels smothered by his huge, loving family. He is terrified of having children because of his12 other siblings, but his large family adds another layer to a man who, despite his gallantry is flawed. He is a womanizer. He acts impulsively.

Uneven characterization aside, both Caro and Christian sound most of the novel looking foolish. Incredibly, neither of them works out who the other is. What’s more is that secondary characters are able to untangle their web of debit with scant information and after only a brief period of time. It would be easy for Beverly to get away with her characters not recognizing each other after so many years have passed, but the fact that other characters around them are able to figure it all out almost unforgivable.

The Secret Wedding is a layered romance. It’s a huge undertaking, and the plot with all its twists and turns could fall apart – luckily it mostly doesn’t. The suspenseful plot twists, and character’s problems could be solved with a letter or asking a few questions, but because Beverley’s plot construction is masterful enough, the reader goes along with it. The novel is filled with a great deal of action – sword fights, daring rescues, chases, a few wars stories. It’s well researched, and it’s more than just the history that is detailed. Its territorial nuances add authenticity to be differences between English’s urban, industrial south and the rural north of Christian’s native Yorkshire.

One can already guess how The Secret Wedding ends. But it’s how the lovers arrive at their happy ending that manages to intrigue.

Reviewed by S.I.
This book is available online @ Amazon

Buy it online: @Amazon

This is a beautiful small book. It sits on my table, compact. The cover is has a pretty script, and depicts a smooth, metal-dark stone, lying on a delicate mosaic-like background. The name itself sounds sweet. It is a pleasure to look at. Dear reader, as you begin this book, you will soon understand that there is nothing pretty here. There is such bitterness that it is sometimes hard to turn the pages without flinching. This is a beautiful, brave book. Don’t let its size fool you.

Sag-e Saboor is the Patience Stone, in ancient Persian folklore. It is a shoulder to cry on, a refuge. It is always there. It is hard and smooth, but it is also a sponge that soaks up the pressure. It can go on and on, absorbing grief. It is the title of a popular, romantic Iranian song of loneliness and longing. It is the essence, the core, of an Afghan’s woman life, and in a sense the key to her survival.

As Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner) notes in his short introduction to this book, Afghan women have been deprived of their basic human rights since long before the Taliban era. The cold, hard centre of their lives has been largely service to a man, or men. And so, this story begins – a woman serving a man. Her husband lies on the floor, paralysed by a bullet lodged in the back of his brain. He has been lying there for close to three weeks, immobile and unspeaking, but breathing, open-eyed. The woman kneels beside him; she prays softly; she reads from an open Koran set on a velvet pillow. She strokes his face gently, whispers to him, administers eye drops to keep his open eyes moist, and checks the solution in his drip. Her two young daughters call her, and she leaves him from time to time to tend to their needs; then she immediately returns to her husband’s side, a picture of devotion.

Time passes. The woman’s life seems to hang on her husband’s breath; she breathes in time with him, counting the breaths and the days. The time of prayers comes and goes, and sounds from the street begin to intervene. Shots are fired, footsteps and occasional voices heard; the neighbour sings and prays, a woman alone, like her. But none of them interrupt the man’s breathing, and his paralysis continues.

The woman begins to talk – not to herself, but to the man whom she realizes is, finally and ironically, her own Patience Stone. She feels abandoned, angry at her husband’s fellow warriors, who ran away; now, she has only her husband, and a distant aunt, who takes in her children when the violence outside her window intensifies. She recounts childhood memories: herself and her sisters, “seven girls deprived of affection”; her betrothal at age 17 to a man she had never seen; and the loveless sex with her husband. Bitterness begins to seep into her thoughts and her words. She talks to her husband about his brothers, who spied on her lustfully; her own passions rise. She rages and curses; weeps and despairs; her voice, at first subdued, grows louder. She retells a long fable of incest, revenge and the possibility of forgiveness, related to her years earlier by her father-in-law. She spills out dirty little secrets.

The Patience Stone, silent, unmoving, takes it all in. this desperate, painfully intimate drama is played out in one room, and barely moves beyond it. The reader becomes acquainted with every tiny detail – the holes in the curtains, patterned sadly with flying birds. Escaping, perhaps. And yet, one wants to stay in this small, sad room. It’s not safe to walk out into the fear as yet unknown, the disturbing, often incoherent sounds of a city in conflict. Best to stay here.

And when people do, almost inevitably, intrude on the woman’s solitary ordeal; she uses them for her own purposes. They are introduced into the narrative to show you, dear reader, our heroine’s ability to act on her emotions, long repressed. At that point, you may find them a distraction, as she does. She simply wants to be alone with her man, her Sang-e Saboor.

A quick note here: I use the word “heroine” with some caution, as there is very little that is noble about her. She is an ordinary woman in the bleak and lonely landscape of war and religion, and her harsh language reflects that. Brutality is what she knows, and understands.

What happens to the Patience Stone in the end? The story goes that, when it fills up to overflowing with pain, when the pressure becomes too tight, it bursts, flying into a thousand pieces, like a stone set in a fiery desert.

That day, according to legend will be judgement day, and the day when man (and woman) will be set free from their suffering forever. And so they are.

“It struck me that this culture of vengeance was the reason why, time and again, Afghanistan descends into new forms of violence. This refusal to mourn, always to seek vengeance without concession, meant that even as the Soviets withdrew with one million dead behind them, we were fighting again.” (Atiq Rahimi on the post-Soviet era in Afghanistan).

Author Note: Atiq Rahimi was born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1962, and grew up in a house full of literature and music. His mother was a teacher and his father a provincial governor under the monarchy of Zahir Shah. He studied at the Franco-Afghan Lycee. His monarchist father was imprisoned for three years in 1973, after the coup d’état. Rahimi joined him in exile in India for a few years. He returned to Afghanistan just after the Soviet invasion of 1979 and studied literature at the University of Kabul. He also worked as a film critic. When he was csalled up for military service he was offered exemption if he would submit to Soviet rule. Like his elder brother. Unwilling to do this, at age 22, he decided to flee from Afghanistan on foot – a three day walk over the mountains into Pakistan with a group of twenty others. In Pakistan he applied for political asylum in France. He studied audio-visual communications at the Sorbonne, producing several documentary films for French television. His first novel, Earth and Ashes, was written partly in response to the Taliban takeover of his homeland, and also to the murder of his brother. He directed a film of the book in 2004; it won a total of 25 wards, including at the Cannes Film Festival. His 2006 novel, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear was set in the era of Soviet rule and is also to be made into a film. The Patience Stone, written in French, won Le Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, in 2008. Rahimi returned to Afghanistan for the first time in 2002, and is working to set up a Writer’s House in Kabul. He also works closely with young Afghan film-makers and directors, as Senior Creative Advisor for the country’s largest media group, Moby Group (founded by four Afghan siblings, the Mohsenis; see mobygroup.com. “See it, jump on it, do it. Don’t expect it to be easy and don’t quit just because they say it can’t be done.”) Rahimi created and directed Afghanistan’s first soap opera, Secrets of This House, which has also won international awards. He lives in Paris and divides his time between France and Afghanistan.

Buy The Patience Stone online: @Amazon

Certainly, there is a historical chronology to the novels, but you can start with whichever book you wish and not get lost. Most Redwall novels are stand-alone tales set in different eras in Redwall Abbey’s history. The Redwall universe, including High Rhulain, is set in the fictional woodlands of Mossflower Wood, with Redwall Abbey – built entirely of red sandstone – at its centre. Even though High Rhulain is fantasy it doesn’t include typically fantasy conventions such as elves and wizards. Instead, the book features anthropomorphic animals, most of which are found in Britain. The animals have all the traits of humans, but humans are never mentioned nor do they appear in the book.

In High Rhulain, like all Redwall novels, the animals or beasts are divided into good or evil based on their species. The heroic woodland animals include badgers, birds, dormice, hares, hedgehogs, mice, moles, otters, seals, shrews, squirrels and voles. The evil animals, or “vermin”, include birds, ermine, ferrets, foxes, pine martens, rats, stoats, weasels and wildcats.

High Rhulain follows adventures of young otter maid, Tiria Wildlough, who sets out from Redwall Abbey on a quest for Green Isle (an island Jacques based on Ireland) to take her places as High Rhulain (or High Queen), and help her otter brethren rid their island of the evil wildcat warlord, Riggu Felis. The novel focuses heavily on themes Brian Jacques typically loves to explore, including differences between freedom and slavery, the price of war, courage, the ability of one creature to change the world, and destiny.

The novel goes back on forth on three subplots: Tiria’s journey to Green Isle, her felloe Redwallers’ endeavour to find Rhulain’s regalia, and otter insurgency on Green Isle. Wildcat Riggu Felis, Green Isles warlord, rules the isle with an iron paw, enslaving otters and trying and trying to stamp out the resistance of free otters and their brave leader, Leatho Shellbound. Leatho and his otter warriors frequently attack Felis and his catguards in attempts to free their friends and family from the wildcat’s tyranny. Meanwhile at Redwall, Tiria Woodlough learns from a prophetic dream that the Green Isle otters need her to save them from Riggu Felis’ terrible reign. Tiria eventually sets out for Green Isle visiting a cast of characters along the way including the Guosim shrews, Cuthberth Blanedale Frunk, and dangerous pompous Long Patrol hare and Mandoral Highpeak, Badger Lord of mountain stronghold, Salamandastron.

High Rhulain is filled with what makes other Redwall novels so successful. Young adults can easily relate to the believable, well-crafted characters. Tiria, the novel’s heroine, follows in Jacques’ great tradition of gender equality. In the Redwall universe, female characters have the same power, cunning and strength that the male do, and Tiria is no exception. She is a master at the slingshot, and a brave even in her first battle with a gang of vicious water rats. In addition to her courage, she is also compassionate. She questions her need to use violence and is shocked when she first kills another creature even though he means her loved ones no harm.

High Rhulain also gives a sense of a real place. Even though the book is essentially about talking animals, it never feels absurd because Jacques grounds it in reality with great detail. He sharply describes the settings of Redwall Abbey, its surrounding countryside, Green Isle, and the sea with extraordinary precision. He draws the reader in by describing even the breakfast that his characters are eating. The Redwall novels are known for detailed descriptions of sumptuous food, or “vittles”. Jacques also fills High Rhulain with riddles that the reader delights in trying to solve, and line after line of poems and songs – some funny, some tragic, others stirring war chants. He describes battles and action with riveting detail. Jacques is brilliant at writing accents and dialects, giving his characters Scottish, Welsh and Irish accents, or even creating dialects of his own, like ‘mole-speech’. His otters are seafarers and are designed to sound like sailors or old sea dogs.

Jacques is a master at entwining two or more subplots to create a coherent plot, but there are problems. The book sticks to Redwall’s typical formula – the woodland inhabitants of Redwall Abbey try to solve a riddle to help a questing comrade all while defending the abbey from vermin enemies, meanwhile a creature and a group of friends embark on an epic journey from the abbey. For the first-time reader, particularly the young one, this tale of riddles, battles and adventures feel new, even wondrous. But for the long-time fan, or adult reader, the book suffers from a sense of predictability.

The novel is an excellent place to start for a young person searching for a new fantasy, or as encouragement to fall in love with reading, or for an adult to be swept away to a far-off place again. High Rhulain clearly shows the difference between good and evil, and magically, it takes animals to reveal humanity for what it is and can be. Jacques has said he chose to write animals because “animals are better people than people are”.

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This final book in Larsson’s Millennium crime fiction trilogy is an adrenaline rush, and is being touted as the best being saved for last. The usual suspects are all included once again: whiz computer hacker Lizbeth Salander, and journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who must work together to unravel a decades-old cover up about the man who shot Salander in the final pages of the previous book. The man was her father, a Soviet intelligence defector.

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The book is masterfully structured like individual short stories from all the characters’ points of view, except that they are not short stories, though each could actually stand on its own. Rather, they are a coalesce to form an absorbing tale that would be fun to read by the pool this summer. It’s available at Amazon, but you could also check your local bookstores for it as well.

Short review by SL

These days most of the talk among single woman is about relationships and finding men who are willing and even more importantly happy to commit. Single women search for opinions and advice from anyone they believe is experienced and will give them the hard truths and I believe it is for this reason, why this book has become such a popular read.

I was hesitant about the advice Steve Harvey, popular comedian, “King of Comedy” would provide. Would this be another big joke about what could be considered a serious and sometimes depressing issue for women? However, Harvey has partnered with relationship expert, and columnist for Parenting magazine Denene Millner to help women understand what men really think about relationships, intimacy and commitment.

In Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, Harvey and Millner provide their readers, which we will assume are predominantly women with direct and often comical information to help in dealing with and understanding men.

Harvey, decided to write this relationship book after his advice from the “Ask Steve” segment of his popular syndicated radio show, the Steve Harvey Morning Show, became very popular and men and women began asking when he would write a book. Act like a Lady, Think Like a Man is divided into 3 sections and 15 chapters exploring common scenarios that women will encounter in their quest for a long –term committed relationship: dealing with but not limited to; how men view sex, mama’s boys, cheaters, and marriage.

This book is written in a conversational style and provides advice in the way one would expect coming from their big brother, cousin or best friend. The information is easy to relate to and Harvey comes across as a close male friend providing you with the real truths and basically the inside scoop on men, their thoughts and their view on women and relationships.

Overall, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man is enjoyable, entertaining and sometimes “slap your knees” hilarious, while allowing the reader to empathize with several of the case studies used in the book.

This book when you really think about it provides women with the advice they have heard before, but decided to turn a blind eye or deaf ear to. Harvey doesn’t really explore new areas of advice and issues. Actually much of what is written has been written before by several authors. However, Harvey does bring it to the forefront of our minds once again, telling it as brutally honest as we could think of getting it and it’s that honesty that is truly appreciated and quite enjoyed. Get this book @ Amazon.

Submitted by Kathy C., Atlanta, GA