American
Fuji
by:
Sara Backer
From
BookPage
“Gaby Stanton, the expatriate protagonist in
Sara Backer’s debut novel, American Fuji , sells
parties for a living. To be more specific, she sells
fantasy funerals: catering and cremation with special
effects. When she visits potential clients in Shizuoka,
Japan, to make her pitch, her boss, Mr. Eguchi, tells
her to notice their toilets and cars. Toilets, he
maintains, tell the truth about people.
So
does fiction, and in this highly enjoyable first novel,
Sara Backer, herself a veteran of living and working
in Japan, imbues her story with enough verisimilitude
and heartfelt emotion that we, too, feel immersed
in a foreign culture with that sense of helplessness
in finding one’s way.
Key
to the central story in the novel are affairs of the
heart, which abound in more ways than one. Gaby, who
has recently been fired from her job as a university
English teacher, takes the job pitching funerals in
desperation—a desperation guided by her need
for health insurance as a chronic condition takes
a turn for the worse. Alex Thorn, an American psychologist
and author of a self-help book called Why Love Fails,
enters her life as he investigates the reasons behind
his son’s death in Japan a year earlier. As
his link to the firm that shipped his son’s
body home, Gaby helps him find answers to his questions,
but more questions arise linked to love of family,
love of a man for a woman and love of place.”
September
16th, 2010
7 P.M.
Easton Library
The
Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity
and Hope
by: William Kamkwamba
From
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. American readers will have their imaginations
challenged by 14-year-old Kamkwamba's description
of life in Malawi, a famine-stricken, land-locked
nation in southern Africa: math is taught in school
with the aid of bottle tops ("three Coca-Cola
plus ten Carlsberg equal thirteen"), people are
slaughtered by enemy warriors "disguised... as
green grass" and a ferocious black rhino; and
everyday trading is "replaced by the business
of survival" after famine hits the country. After
starving for five months on his family's small farm,
the corn harvest slowly brings Kamkwamba back to life.
Witnessing his family's struggle, Kamkwamba's supercharged
curiosity leads him to pursue the improbable dream
of using "electric wind"(they have no word
for windmills) to harness energy for the farm. Kamkwamba's
efforts were of course derided; salvaging a motley
collection of materials, from his father's broken
bike to his mother's clothes line, he was often greeted
to the tune of "Ah, look, the madman has come
with his garbage." This exquisite tale strips
life down to its barest essentials, and once there
finds reason for hopes and dreams, and is especially
resonant for Americans given the economy and increasingly
heated debates over health care and energy policy.
October
21th, 2010
7 P.M.
Easton Library
City
of Thieves
by: David Benioff
From
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Author and screenwriter Benioff follows
up The 25th Hour with this hard-to-put-down novel
based on his grandfather's stories about surviving
WWII in Russia. Having elected to stay in Leningrad
during the siege, 17-year-old Lev Beniov is caught
looting a German paratrooper's corpse. The penalty
for this infraction (and many others) is execution.
But when Colonel Grechko confronts Lev and Kolya,
a Russian army deserter also facing execution, he
spares them on the condition that they acquire a dozen
eggs for the colonel's daughter's wedding cake. Their
mission exposes them to the most ghoulish acts of
the starved populace and takes them behind enemy lines
to the Russian countryside. There, Lev and Kolya take
on an even more daring objective: to kill the commander
of the local occupying German forces. A wry and sympathetic
observer of the devastation around him, Lev is an
engaging and self-deprecating narrator who finds unexpected
reserves of courage at the crucial moment and forms
an unlikely friendship with Kolya, a flamboyant ladies'
man who is coolly reckless in the face of danger.
Benioff blends tense adventure, a bittersweet coming-of-age
and an oddly touching buddy narrative to craft a smart
crowd-pleaser.
November
18 th, 2010
7 P.M.
Easton Library
Please
join us for fresh brewed coffee and goodies courtesy of
the Friends of the Easton Library on Fridays from 10:00
AM to 1:00 PM.