Contemporary Fiction/Classics

Where’d You Go Bernadette is told in epistolary format and revolves around anti-social Bernadette Fox, a former genius-level architect who appears to be agoraphobic, impulsive and suffers from severe social anxiety; her mostly-absent husband Elgie who is an executive computer engineer at Microsoft; and their fifteen-year-old daughter Bee, who has overcome a congenital heart condition and is now a straight-A student at a progressive charter school. Bernadette doesn’t get along with any of the other mothers at her daughter’s school (she refers to them all as “gnats”) and is in a bitter battle with her next-door neighbor Audrey Griffin, who definitely has it out for Bernadette. When her daughter Bee states that she wants a trip to Antartica as the promised reward for her perfect grade, Bernadette freaks out about the trip and begins to have sort of a meltdown.

Everything comes crashing down on Bernadette after her rivalry with Audrey escalates resulting in a mudslide (yes, a mudslide!). After a failed intervention by her husband Elgie, Bernadette disappears without a trace. Now it’s up to her daughter Bee to figure out what happened to her mother. And that’s what she does: by putting together a gigantic compilation of a complex series of emails, voicemails, school memos to parents, faxes, doctor bills, newspaper articles and even doctor reports, all of which reveal Bernadette’s backstory and secret past, of which most people were unaware (I won’t spoil what her secret is). It through all of these devices that Bee tells her mother’s story.

This novel ended up being a fun and entertaining satire on wealth and privilege, with many of the characters being self-deluded and clueless, resulting in some quite humorous over-the-top scenes. Come to think of it, Bernadette’s entire family and all of those around her are all over-the-top caricatures. In fact, everyone seems a bit mad.

I especially loved Bernadette’s character. She’s wildly eccentric, quirky and super complex: a brilliant woman whose suppressed artist talents have resulted in depression and anxiety, yet she’s still hopeful at the end of the day.

There were also quite a few surprising plot twists in the story, and everything came together beautifully at the end. This was such a humorous and inventive novel, and I thought it was absolutely brilliant. I found myself chuckling out loud several times while working my way through the story.

I also appreciated that one of the themes of the story points out what can happen to our mental state if we suppress our inner talents and instead, simply choose to “settle.” All in all, I loved this wacky novel, and if you can appreciate satire with plenty of dark humor, and are willing to suspend disbelief a little, then this book is well worth the read.

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I guess this is a Literary Fiction novel with just a smidgen of magical realism thrown in. Or perhaps not, I guess that’s up to the reader to decide.

So this book asks the question: If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?

The story starts off in 1969 and follows the Gold children who sneak out to get their fortunes told by a mysterious woman who, according to gossip, has the ability to tell you the date that you’re going to die.

So each of the children, one by one, is called in by the psychic and each one is informed of their death day. Each of them then has to cope with this heavy bit of information, and we get to see what extent it determines how they live their lives.

So then we get their story, one child’s at a time, and we follow them to the last moments in their lives. In so doing, we get to see how their life unfolds knowing this information.

These dire prophecies drive them forward for the rest of their lives, seemingly influencing their decisions and even changing the course of their lives.

Some of them end up more reckless and take more risks than they might have otherwise. Others remain more cautious than they may have otherwise.

As I read along, I thought it interesting how the reader is prompted to wonder just how much of our lives are controlled by destiny or sheer luck if you will, and how much of it is controlled by our own conscious choices.

Interestingly, the fate of one of the characters specifically gave me pause and caused me to ask whether receiving a dire prediction as the Gold children did, could cause us to force those events to come to pass when they may not have occurred otherwise? So in this way, having too much information could end up working against us.

Or in the case of the Gold children, Was the fortune teller right? And, if so, do they possess the power to change the course of their own fates and decide their own destiny? That is to say, is our destiny predetermined or do we have a hand in changing what’s destined?

The story also made me wonder whether knowing our death date would cause us to live our lives to the fullest or would we instead live them with fear and dread of what’s coming? And in the case of our four characters, we can’t help but wonder whether their lives would have turned out the way they did were it not for the fortune teller?

This is definitely the kind of book that makes you uncomfortable while reading it — it’s a tough read in places, raw even. It’s a challenging novel as it forces up to consider profound themes such as life and death, destiny vs. free will, magic vs. science, religion, our tendency toward self-fulling prophecy, family, and regret to mention a few.

It’s no surprise then that the story is heartbreaking in more than a few places, but it’s also a deep, beautiful and magical story.

This is an incredible book, and I fell more and more in love with it as I progressed through each child’s story. I loved seeing how the fortune teller’s prediction impacted all of their lives, resulting in a riveting character study. All in all, a magnificent exploration of some weighty topics and I gave this five stars.

In this video, I review Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield — A gripping contemporary gothic fiction novel that I really loved.

This was a Book of the Month club selection for this month, and the synopsis sounded fascinating so I thought I’d pick it up. I was not disappointed.

The Story

The Far Field follows a young, fairly well-off Indian woman from Bangalore named Shalini, whose mother had recently passed away and Shalini is having a difficult time with her mother’s death. She recalls a Kashmiri clothes salesman named Bashir Ahmed who would visit her childhood home and with whom her misanthropic mother struck up a friendship, which in and of itself was unusual, given that her mother was hot-tempered, sarcastic, critical, brutal and mocking of pretty much everyone around her. She definitely was not a pleasant person to be around though Shalini was quite loyal to her. But regardless, Bashir would come to their house every couple of months and spend the afternoon with Shalini and her mother, and it was during those times that her mother appeared happy and joyful, something Shalini usually didn’t see in her mother. Bashir’s visits came to a sudden halt two decades earlier, however, and it was shortly after that when her mother’s mental health went downhill.

Shalini decides to head out to Kashmir find her mother’s long-lost friend, convinced that finding the man and telling him about her mother’s death will somehow bring her closure with her mother’s passing. It is a risky journey on her part given that Kashmir is wracked by war and unrest and that’s precisely what Shalini discovers in the remote Himalayan village where she finds herself. There, she’s immediately integrated into the lives of a generous family who not only offer her shelter and friendship but also protection. But the more her relationship with the local villagers and the family deepens, the more she unknowingly threatens their safety, especially when uncertainty and old hatreds resurface.

What I Liked

First off, I loved how real this story felt to me. I often forgot that I was reading fiction as it felt that I was hearing a memoir from the mouth of someone who had just gone through a challenging time in her life. The attention to detail and the rich descriptions of place in the story made me feel as though I were in the village right along with our protagonist.

I also enjoyed the manner in which the story slowly unfolded, in which the author switches, using alternating timelines, from Shalini’s childhood where we learn about her and her parents, to the present day where we are transported to her time in Kashmir. So we’re allowed to see how Shalini’s past shaped her into the person she is today, for both good and ill. I thought she was a fascinating character and I enjoyed getting to know her as her story evolved. I also loved seeing the evolution of her complicated and often heart-wrenching relationship with her mother and how that relationship — and Shalini herself — changed after Bashir’s final visit.

I loved the many themes that run throughout the story: loss of one’s parent, loss of one’s spouse, grief, family, privilege, suicide, depression, reconnecting with those we have lost, trust, empathy, and politics. Though it is a relatively slow-moving character-driven story, there is so much going on throughout Shalini’s narrative, including numerous twists and turns, which managed to hold my attention throughout the book.

Along with the evocative sense of place, I also adored the secondary characters, all of whom really came to life in this story. They were so vivid, so real even raw at times. Though the rich storytelling, we were able to see and understand the motivations of these characters, with each and every one of them adding essential elements to the story.

I loved the manner in which the culture, the political strife and the unrest of the region were explained to us through the opinions of the locals, also providing us a first-hand account of their challenging everyday lives. I liked how dark and frequently grim situations in the story are lightened by realistic dialogue and genuineness of feeling on the part of the characters. Character development is undoubtedly among the Far Field’s list of shining accomplishments.

What I Didn’t Like

For the most part, I found very little to dislike with this book. There are certain aspects of Shalini’s character, however, that I didn’t particularly care for such as her rudeness and self-centeredness, her sense of entitlement as well as her immaturity. I also felt that her excessive naïveté was a bit over the top for a woman of her age and I had a difficult time buying into it. Though she did mature in several ways by the end of the book, I felt that she didn’t quite reach the level of maturity and empathy for the plight of others that she should have by the story’s end.

It’s also worth mentioning that this is a character-driven story, so there isn’t a lot of action going on in the beginning of the book. As such, the story does take a while to get going.

Verdict

The Far Field is an extremely rich and moving coming of age story that deals with many loaded issues, including class prejudice, guilt, coming to terms with one’s identity, forgiving ourself, regret, taking a good hard look at our beliefs and choices and learning how to live with and accept the terrible decisions we make in life. The author also manages to humanize and provide compassionate insight into the conflict between India and Pakistan that’s plagued the area for so long and in so doing, manages to hit the reader right in the heart.

Though unsettling at times, I felt that this book was also an extraordinary story of a young woman’s passage to self-discovery as she tries to make sense of the chaos around her. This was a subtle blow-me-away kind of book on so many levels, and I’m still mulling it over many days later. I ended up loving this hauntingly beautiful novel and look forward to reading more by this author.

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I’ve read a couple of David Baldacci thriller novels in the past, and The Christmas Train was completely different any from those. I listened to this in audiobook format and was delighted to discover that they added music and various sound effects during certain parts of the recording which really added to the experience. This book was also quite nostalgic for me as it brought back all the fun memories of the train trips I took while studying in France.

This story follows Tom Langdon, a disillusioned journalist and a former war correspondent Tom Langdon who finds himself on a train trip from Washington to Los Angeles during Christmas where he plans on spending the holidays with his girlfriend, a Hollywood voice-work celebrity.

We learn that Tom has been banned from flying for a year after an altercation with a TSA agent so deciding to make lemonade from his lemons, chooses to write a story about train travel.

So, Tom embarks on his journey across country and along the way, he meets all sorts of eclectic and colorful characters: there’s a young couple planning on eloping, a famous movie director who’s planning on creating a movie about trains, a retired priest, a former train engineer who lost his job due to budget cuts, a tarot card reader, several boisterous train personnel, a boys choir and even a reunion with someone from his past.

And there’s a mystery to solve as items begin disappearing from the passenger’s cabins, meaning there is a thief on board among them. But worst of all, the blizzard of the century is bearing down on them, and the passengers and crew are forced to come together if they want to survive the trip — and at one point in the novel, things don’t look too good for any of them.

This was really a fun and warm-hearted Christmas story about a man whose ride turns out to be quite an adventure — one he’ll likely never forget reminding us that it’s often the journey and not the destination that’s important. In fact, there was even a quote to that effect in the book:

“It’s not getting from A to B. It’s not the beginning or the destination that counts. It’s the ride in between”

This delightful tale has a little of everything…it has mystery, danger, thievery, setbacks, suspense, romance, relationship intrigue, unscheduled train stops, a wedding and of course, the miracles of Christmas, and with enough twists and surprises to prevent you from guessing the ending. It also provides an interesting history about trains and train travel that I found especially fascinating.

All in all, The Christmas Train is a sweet, magical story with memorable characters that just may give you the yearning to take a train trip yourself.

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