Category Archives: European

December 4, 2011 · 11:10 am

The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje

With utter certainty, I can claim that I’ve never ever been remotely disappointed by a Michael Ondaatje title. Until now, alas. Here’s my very best advice to you about this, his long-awaited new title, The Cat’s Table: read it page by page for yourself only; do not choose the audible option, even as the venerable Ondaatje himself narrates. Really. At least with this work, Ondaatje’s voice unfortunately expresses a sense of detachment so visceral that bonding with the book’s protagonist proves difficult at best …

Perhaps his distance might be explained in the “Author’s Note” at title’s end, in which Ondaatje insists, “Although the novel sometimes uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography, The Cat’s Table is fictional – from the captain and crew and all its passengers on the boat down to the narrator.” That narrator, ironically, is also named Michael, also born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), also moved to England at the age of 11, and also grew up to be a writer with a Canadian address. As if to downplay those similarities (but why?), Ondaatje’s voice unintentionally results in a disengaged, aloof narration.

In Colombo late at night, Michael, the 11-year-old narrator here, boards the big ship Oronsay alone: “… it was explained to me that after I’d crossed the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea, and gone through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, I would arrive one morning on a small pier in England and my mother would meet me there.”

As the ship begins its journey, Michael is placed at Table 76 for his meals, also known as ‘the cat’s table’ – “the least privileged place,” he quickly learns. His tablemates include “two other boys roughly my age,” who become his adventurous companions throughout the voyage and beyond. One friendship will last a lifetime; the other will remain a spectral presence. Michael’s three-week passage will include other memorable characters – his beguiling distant cousin Emily, a mysterious criminal about whose offenses no one seems to be quite sure, late-night gambling bunkmates, and a young deaf girl who is magic on a trampoline. In between “Departure” and “Arrival,” Michael intersperses fragments from his adult life, fluidly passing from past, present, future, and back again, offering elliptical details of what followed that pivotal multi-sea crossing.

All my favorite literary elements are here: non-linear time, sparse but profound writing, characters with mysteries to be solved (or not), fateful reunions, etc. etc. If only had known to read, not listen; the iPod failed me for sure this time! So perhaps as I impatiently anticipate Ondaatje’s next book, I’ll have the time to re-read, re-discover. re-imagine Cat’s Table all for myself …

Readers: Adult

Published: 2011

1 Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, Canadian, Canadian Asian Pacific American, European, South Asian, South Asian American, Sri Lankan, Sri Lankan American

Tagged as , , , , , ,

November 22, 2011 · 4:36 pm

The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht

With the gushing acknowledgement of her debut novel – 2011 Orange Prize, 2011 National Book Award finalist, enthusiastic thumbs up from the New Yorker, New York Times, and too many starred reviews to count – Téa Obreht is already a renowned wunderkind.

Always curious about that level of fuss, I finally picked up the novel, and stuck it into my ears (narrated by veteran audible regulars Susan Duerden and Robin Sachs). Perhaps that’s where I went wrong … perhaps this is fiction meant only to be read, not listened to. Still, I’m compelled to out myself as quite possibly the only person on the planet who thinks the overwhelming hype surrounding Tiger’s Wife is more hyperbole than substance.

Here’s the story – three, actually, to be more precise: 1. Young Dr. Natalia takes a detour from her work at an orphanage across the border to collect the few belongings of her beloved grandfather who has unexpectedly died far from home; 2. Natalia’s grandfather shares his memories of “the deathless man,” a mysterious stranger who never aged and, no matter what, could never die; and 3. Natalia uncovers her grandfather’s childhood tale of the abused, deaf, mute woman known as ‘the tiger’s wife.’

So here’s what I ultimately got from the cleverly intertwining narrative strands: wunderkind Obreht (born in 1985, making her barely in her mid-20s) has no problem putting together gorgeous, mellifluous sentences. She will, without a shadow of a doubt, write even more amazing, more accomplished books in the years to come. But my bottom line … in spite of the gorgeous prose and the epic stories, Tiger’s Wife in the end, just didn’t move me.

No characters stood out as spectacular, in spite of the spectacular things that happened to many of them. The remembrances of things past – especially of war and the price of survival – felt too distanced and detached to resonate. Natalia’s grandmother is too shrill, her mother strangely absent, Natalia too self-absorbed in her endless ruminations about what might or might not be happening. Even the mythic characters of her grandfather’s childhood – the eponymous tiger’s wife, her desperately abusive husband, the legendary bear man, the wandering apothecary – hardly lived up to their potential uniqueness.

Perhaps three stories in one were too much for one novel. Which only proves Obreht must have the imagination for many more. My current disappointment aside, for now the waiting begins for what is surely to come …

Readers: Adult

Published: 2011

Leave a Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, European

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

November 15, 2011 · 8:58 am

On Black Sisters Street by Chika Unigwe

Four women, living together in a house in Antwerp, Belgium, are “[t]hrown together by a conspiracy of fate and a loud man called Dele.” They have escaped their lives in Africa, but only at the cost of their freedom; Dele, who orchestrated their immigration, now controls their bodies which each must sell over and over again in order to repay their enormous debts.

By page 30, one of the four women is dead and her murderer is bluntly revealed. Her death – ironically and tragically – is the impetus that binds the remaining three together beyond their shared address, their shared customers, their owners and handlers. Efe and the better life she will make for the young son she left behind, Ama and the hypocritical man of God who was supposed to be her father, and Joyce and her nightmarish memories of death, destruction, and desertion, will each survive. Only Sisi, unwilling to accept her unexciting life with her disappointed aging parents and her less-than-ambitious boyfriend, has paid for her dreams with her violent demise.

Chika Unigwe – whose debut novel, De Feniks, holds the distinction of being the first fiction title written by a Flemish writer of African origin – makes her Stateside debut with Black Sisters, originally published in Dutch as Fata Morgana. [Slight aside: Rather mysteriously, no translator is credited in the 2011 U.S. edition, although a note is added about a "slightly different" English translation which was published in the U.K. in 2009; no mention of a U.K. translator, either. Hmmm.] According to the enclosed PR materials, Unigwe, herself an immigrant from Nigeria, was so curious about the red-light district women in Antwerp that she donned “skimpy clothing and thigh-high boots” and spent two years researching these women’s lives, so different from her own middle-class Catholic upbringing.

With wide-open, unflinching eyes, Unigwe layers and weaves her experiences of being among the women. Beyond the unthinkable challenges the women face daily, Unigwe carefully reveals four individual, flawed, searching women who are far more than mere victims of the age-old oppressive sex trade. With their desperation, she finds small moments of peace. With their frustration and longing, she gives substance to the glimmers of hope for a different future. Unigwe finds and celebrates their humanity, even in a world so blindly determined on its very destruction.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2011 (United States)

Leave a Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Translation, African, European

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

September 21, 2011 · 9:39 am

The Thinking Girl’s Treasury of Dastardly Dames

Cleopatra: “Serpent of the Nile” by Mary Fisk Pack, illustrated by Peter Malone
Agrippina: “Atrocious and Ferocious” by Shirin Yim Bridges, illustrated by Peter Malone
Mary Tudor: “Bloody Mary” by Gretchen Maurer, illustrated by Peter Malone
Catherine de’ Medici: “The Black Queen” by Janie Havemeyer, illustrated by Peter Malone
Marie Antoinette: “Madame Deficit” by Liz Hockinson, illustrated by Peter Malone
Cixi: “The Dragon Empress” by Natasha Yim, illustrated by Peter Malone

From the publishers of last year’s fabulous The Thinking Girl’s Treasury of Real Princesses comes the next sixsome of history-making, mold-breaking women who clearly made and lived by their own rules, judgments be cast aside. The lives of these dastardly dames are filled with so many surprises and shockers that even savvy adults will surely enjoy moments of ‘I didn’t know that …’

Although her Greek Ptolemy family had ruled Egypt for over 250 years, Cleopatra was the first Ptolemy to actually speak Egyptian, just one of the nine languages she spoke fluently. Her brilliance made her beautiful, in spite of what her contemporaries recorded as her “severe cheekbones, a hooked nose, and a jutting chin.” As fitting for Egyptian royalty at the time, Cleopatra’s first partner was her younger brother; she was 18, her brother 10 when their father died and left the siblings in charge.

Born almost a century later, Agrippina was distantly related by association to Cleopatra: Agrippina was the great-granddaughter of Rome’s first emperor, Octavian (aka Augustus), who was the grand-nephew and heir of Julius Caesar, who was Cleo’s lover (and father of her first child) between her brother/husband and dashing Mark Anthony. Got all that? Agrippina sure had wickedly royal intentions, but growing up and into all that court intrigue (she was the sister, wife, and even mother of three different Roman emperors), she surely learned (and survived as long as she could) by example!

And we thought religion-ignited terrorism was a modern invention! Mary Tudor had us beat by half a millennium, overseeing the burning, hacking, quartering of Protestants in an attempt to restore Catholicism to English borders. As the daughter of church-splitting Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon (the daughter of überCatholics Isabella and Ferdinand of Spanish Inquisition fame), Mary never got over Daddy’s divorce and even worse, his marrying non-Catholic Anne Boleyn without the Pope’s blessing. Amazingly, stepmama Anne was Catherine’s maid of honor!

Born three years after Bloody Mary, Catherine de’ Medici also spent her life fighting Protestantism, this time in her adopted France where the Florentine-born, grand-niece of Pope Clement VII married the would-be King Henry II (at age 14). Both the ruling Catholics and the growing French Protestants, called Huguenots, were downright evil to each other – all in the name of God, of course. Leading the most vicious, bloody charge was Queen Catherine (one of her trusted advisors was Nostradamus!), determined to keep her Catholic Medici line going, going, going … until they were finally gone, gone, gone.

Another foreign-born French royal, Marie Antoinette, didn’t actually say “Let them eat cake,” but she didn’t care too much about her common subjects. Pretty and spoiled, she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the court (more or less illiterate, speaking only broken French), but then hubby Louis XVI was no prince charming either. She did bring croissants with her from her native Vienna, “created by Viennese bakers to celebrate a victory against the Turks”: crescent, Islam, Turkish flag, get it? So ‘let them eat croissants’ would have been more accurate.

Brutal machinations know no borders, as the final dame moves us to China, where Cixi was born a commoner and rose from royal concubine to Imperial Consort by birthing the emperor’s only son. When that son eventually ascended the throne (at age 5), she named herself Dowager Empress and took tight control. Her greedy misuse of power would eventually earn her a historical place “as the woman who brought a dynasty crashing to its knees”: at her death at age 72, she had outlived three emperors, a 260-year dynasty, and 5,000 years of imperial rule.

With six different writers this time around – the Dames‘ series editor and Agrippina author Shirin Yim Bridges wrote the entire Real Princesses series herself! – the tone and structure here are understandably not as uniform: for example, two dames get a truth vs. reputation comparison that would have been appreciated for all six. That said, single illustrator Peter Malone uses photographs, paintings, historical documents, and his own artwork to give all six titles a definitive look and feel (gory blood splatters and all!).

Other minor quibbles: given how interrelated all the western royals were and continue to be, a family tree would surely have been appreciated; the dames’ timeline included in each book could have used both birth and death years; and, as with each of the Princesses, bibliographies would certainly have been appreciated.

Overall, though? These dastardly dames definitely deserve your attention. They might be examples of how not to be, but then, as Harvard history professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s award-winning, oft-quoted book title goes, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. True that!

Readers: Children, Middle Grade

Published: 2011

4 Comments

Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, ..Middle Grade Readers, .Biography, .Nonfiction, Chinese, Egyptian, European

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

September 18, 2011 · 11:11 am

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Eight years have passed since Jeffrey Eugenides won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (as well as too many other accolades to list) for this, his second novel, and nine years since it was first published. Nine years later (pattern forming here? – his debut The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex are also nine years apart), Eugenides’ longingly anticipated, much buzzed-about third, The Marriage Plot, is about to hit shelves in a couple of weeks (official pub date: October 11), and that anticipation is probably what finally prompted me to pick up Middlesex. The pressure, the pressure!

Clearly Middlesex holds one of fiction’s most memorable opening lines: “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”

At 41, Calliope Helen Stephanides by birth certificate is now simply Cal according to his current (German) driver’s license. But even before Cal’s inception, the family saga spans 250 prior years, complete with chromosomal mutations, fifth cousins who are also siblings, triple migrations (from Greece to Turkey to the United States), multiple wars and other conflagrations, and various saints and avid sinners who all play an active role in his creation, and his undefinable, unpredictable life. Cal’s own epic self-discovery, intricately interwoven through his ancestral tale, is a complex … dare I say … transformative journey.

Eugenides’ playful, seemingly effortless invention belies his fearsome erudition. Absolutely, without a doubt, Middlesex is not to be missed … and, as in my case, truly an enormously rewarding better-late-than-never read.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2002

1 Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, European

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

September 12, 2011 · 12:00 pm

Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

Regardless of what is actually happening on the page (even brutality, sometimes tragedy), Michael Ondaatje’s writing is something akin to a velvety, soothing dream. In a perfect world, reading (or better yet, listening to … in this case, to the lulling voice of actor Hope Davis) the Sri Lankan-born, Canadian-domiciled Ondaatje would be done in an uninterrupted flow …

Anna, Claire, and Cooper are three siblings unrelated by blood. Their widowed farmer father creates his family, taking in young Cooper at age 4 after his parents are murdered then bringing newly orphaned Claire home from the hospital with his birthdaughter Anna when he loses Anna’s mother in childbirth. Sixteen years later, the father will shatter that same family.

Almost two decades since the fateful storm that tore her family apart, Anna reappears in a remote French village, researching the life and work of late-19th century French poet and novelist Lucien Segura. Anna is living a “quiet and anonymous time” in Segura’s home, content to spend most of her waking hours at Segura’s own kitchen table … until she goes out one day to explore her surroundings and brings home a lover who has an intimate connection to Segura and this manoir home.

Back across the Pond and across the continent, Claire is working in San Francisco for a lawyer, her job having to do with a different kind of research. Most weekends, she travels back to the family farm to see their father in Petaluma; she is the only child who returns home. By chance, out on assignment, Claire meets Cooper who in his adulthood has become a professional gambler; she will once again need to save him.

Time, narrative, histories are all seemingly borderless in Ondaatje’s novel. From the 1970s to 1990s to the decades leading up to World War I, Ondaatje intricately weaves together fragments from two families – separated at the very least by thousands of miles and almost a century, and yet overlapping in so many intimate details of their very existence.

For readers to know so much more than the characters is almost aching knowledge … and still we can never know enough. With prose so beckoning, so addictive, finishing an Ondaatje novel always comes with both satisfaction and want.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2007

1 Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, Canadian, European, Nonethnic-specific, South Asian American, Sri Lankan American

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

September 10, 2011 · 11:59 am

The Millennium Trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson, translated by Reg Keeland

I’m probably one of the last readers on earth to have managed to avoid this international (posthumous) publishing phenomenon. I might as well confess right now that I never finished the Harry Potter series, either (made it through the first three with gritted teeth, but hey, at least I tried!). The Larsson trilogy, in large part thanks to the narrating prowess of Simon Vance, makes for entertaining (albeit somewhat uneven, often implausible) company on long runs … in fact, Dragon Tattoo got me through the Park City Marathon last month (the first 16 miles were gruelingly uphill!), and I admit I definitely got hooked (lack of oxygen – it’s up at 7,000 feet – might also have been a factor).

The original Swedish title for Dragon Tattoo seems far more fitting: in English translation, it’s Men Who Hate Women. Certainly, the male species isn’t particularly well-portrayed throughout the trilogy – but I’m getting ahead of myself …

Mikael Blomkvist, the journalist publisher of Millennium magazine, has made a mess of his career, finding himself charged with libel against a powerful corporate magnate, Hans-Erik Wennerström. While Blomkvist is waiting to serve his jail term, he’s summoned by a wealthy, aging businessman, Henrik Vanger, to solve a decades-old family mystery: the disappearance of Henrik’s beloved niece Harriet, long presumed dead. Harriet, it turns out, was also once Blomkvist’s babysitter.

Blomkvist is eventually paired with the eponymous ‘girl,’ Lisbeth Salandar, who was originally hired by Vanger Enterprises to do a background check on Blomkvist. Once he gets over his initial grumbling, Blomkvist realizes Salander is an unpredictable amalgam of immeasurable talents. She’s quite the enigma – a loner, socially inept, but brilliant beyond description. She’s been brutalized and victimized, but she’s managed to survive unspeakable horrors. Her tiny size belies her fierce prowess which proves well-matched against Blomkvist’s ego …

In part 2, Fire, which apparently retains its original title in English translation, Salander is missing through most of the book – a definite detriment to the story. The Wennerström affair has left Blomkvist dealing with the annoyances of being a major celebrity. Salander got so annoyed with Blomkvist that she’s taken a year off to travel the world. Back in Stockholm, Blomkvist is at a loss as to what he did to lose Salander, but he’s busy enough working with freelance journalist, Dag Svensson, who presents Millennium with a major sex-trafficking exposé. Svensson’s girlfriend is preparing her doctoral thesis on the same subject from an academic perspective. The two end up brutally murdered, and Salander is named the prime suspect. Blomkvist is convinced otherwise and is determined to prove her innocence.

Fire is the weakest link of the trilogy – overwritten with too many useless subplots and tediously repetitive enough to make you question if the iPod has gotten inexplicably stuck. The Swedish police are arrogant misogynists and/or blundering fools; private detectives and journalists don’t fare much better. Men do little than behave very, very badly. Worst of all, the whodunnit portion is so glaringly obvious by page 131 (in the hardcover edition), you can practically skip to the last chapter and save yourself a few hundred pages.

Which brings us to the conclusion, finally. Originally titled The Air Castle That Was Blown Up, Salander spends over half the book in a hospital bed. But a near-comatose, recovering Salander is better than missing from the page, which makes Nest considerably better than Fire, although still not on par with Dragon. Shot in the head and buried alive by her father and half-brother (dysfunction in this family knows no bounds), Salander is fighting for her life, while Blomkvist is battling her many detractors. This time the Swedish government and its ultra secret division of Swedish Security get flayed.

The final courtroom showdown, with Blomkvist’s sister Annika Giannini making mincemeat of liars, cheaters, murderers, rapists, and pedophiles, is delicious revenge, well peppered with blunt, curse-filled interjections from Salander. But before your reward, you’ll have to suffer through long bouts of tedious treading, including a strangely unnecessary stalking plot involving a pathetic miscreant who blames his desperate situation on being ignored by Millenium‘s editor-in-chief Erika Berger waaaaay back in high school.

All that said, Salander is ultimately worth the wading and wait. Will I miss Salander? Absolutely. She truly is indomitable. In one of the endless articles about Larsson, he recounts his neverending guilt over witnessing at age 15, the gang rape of a young girl whose name happened to be Lisbeth. He didn’t , or couldn’t, help her then. Decades later in his vivid imagination, he does allow her to save her own self, over and over and over again … nail gun and all! Literal justice indeed.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2008-2010 (United States)

2 Comments

Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, .Translation, European

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

August 25, 2011 · 10:44 am

Defiance: Resistance Book 2 by Carla Jablonski, illustrated by Leland Purvis, color by Hilary Sycamore

The story of the brave Tessier children, begun in last year’s Resistance, continues here with the focus on the middle child, teenager Paul and his courageous tenacity. The year is 1943, and the German occupation of France is an everyday nightmare. “[T]o ensure their continued control, the Germans create a new and vicious police force: the Milice (French Military Police),” staffed with eager French volunteers ready to inform even on their neighbors. They’re also grabbing local citizens and shipping them to Germany for “compulsory labor” to continue the war effort. No one is safe.

In spite of German control, the Tessier children find “new forms of resistance.” Older daughter Sylvie quickly learns that her feminine charms don’t go unnoticed by the young, lonely German soldiers. Youngest child Marie is starting to understand that she can do more than just wait for Papa to come home. Paul continues to put up his anti-German sketches, distribute secret pamphlets, and run errands as necessary. And when the time comes to make a life-threatening decision, Paul doesn’t hesitate to help the Resistance fighters …

Together, these swift-moving graphic volumes of a planned trilogy present an excellent introduction to a lesser known chapter of World War II history. Choosing children to tell the story for children, Carla Jablonski and Leland Purvis strike just the right balance between pressing urgency and impending danger to both entertain and inform. The final installment will definitely be a title to watch for closely.

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2011

1 Comment

Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Graphic Novel/Manga/Manwha, European

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

August 22, 2011 · 10:37 am

Tokyo on Foot: Travels in the City’s Most Colorful Neighborhoods by Florent Chavouet

During a term I spent as a grad student in Yokohama, Japan, I wandered every free afternoon through nearby Tokyo with camera in hand. Knowing my time was limited, I even planned out a detailed schedule for which neighborhood (Tokyo is sprawling!) I would go to when. I did eventually mount all those endless pictures into photo albums (that’s all we had back then in the 20th century), although I couldn’t tell you where they are now …

But no matter, because Frenchman Florent Chavouet’s recent graphic memoir is a huge improvement on my anonymous photos … and for those familiar with Tokyo at all, it’s quite the remarkable, humorous, highly colorful walk down memory lane, as well.

Chavouet lands in Tokyo for six months in 2006, accompanying his partner while she completes an international internship. With time on his hands, “I started to draw, with no particular goal in mind. Accompanied by my two most faithful friends, a lady’s bicycle and a folding chair, I went scouring the streets to see what my new surroundings looked like.”

Divided into chapters that highlight a specific Tokyo neighborhood, Chavouet opens each with that neighborhood’s kōban, the local police precinct building. Stations vary in size and staff, but most in unique personality – you really need to see to fully appreciate Chavouet’s fabulously insightful humor. Then comes a hand-drawn map of just the specific neighborhood – “admittedly quite personal in their details” – that serves as a guide to that chapter’s unpredictable illustrations that follow. From what Chavouet saw, did, ate – bugs, festivals, storefronts, a fake French mansion, random drinks and snacks – his illustrations catch perfect little details you’ll never find in any guide book. His myriad of people (especially those kōban­ dwellers!) caught in the midst of their everyday lives are undoubtedly the book’s highlight.

Chavouet manages to survive on less than ¥900 a day (less than $8 in 2006!) on his creative forays, although he chides himself for not learning nearly enough Japanese. “[A]ll that observing and sketching,” however, did help him “develop his own visual style.” By the time he’s back in his native France, he’s got an award-winning, fascinating book that surely makes for ideal reading for both armchair tourists and peripatetic travelers alike.

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2011 (United States)

1 Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Graphic Novel/Manga/Manwha, .Memoir, European, Japanese

Tagged as , , , ,

June 11, 2011 · 9:49 am

Landing by Emma Donoghue

Had I not been so enthralled with Room, I don’t know if I would have discovered Emma Donoghue‘s many other titles, but I’ve definitely been enjoying reading newly discovered authors’ works backwards.

Take a look at the cover and you can probably guess what Landing is about. Yup, it’s a love story. But with Donoghue at the helm, you have to expect some unconventionality at the very least.

So the hand on the left belongs to Síle (pronounced Sheila) O’Shaughnessy of Dublin, Ireland, and the right to Jude Turner of Ireland, Ontario. Síle may be Irish-born and bred, but with an Indian mother, she’s not quite Irish enough for some people. At 39, she’s spent many years as a worldly flight attendant, staying well-connected via her “gizmo,” enjoying a rather glamorous city life when she’s on the ground. At 25, Jude – also a hybrid mix, of a Canadian father and an English mother – is a technophobic Luddite, runs a small village’s tiny museum, and has never had the need or desire to travel very far.

The two meet on a plane over a dead body (!) … Síle working, Jude hoping to survive her inaugural flight (another !). How much more memorable can love at first sight be? In spite of thousands of miles, die-hard habits, missing mothers, past and present lovers, doubting friends, Síle and Jude slowly work their lives together.

Interwoven with the pitter-patter inducing love story is a mindful look at immigration (“emigration sounded noble and tragic, immigration grubby and grasping”), from peripatetic parents criss-crossing the globe to their stay-at-home progeny facing re-invention and relocation. Falling in love outside your comfort zone means borders change, populations shift, cultures adapt, racism threatens, and strangers can become family.

Just a final thought … perhaps Donoghue writes part of her own immigration story here: Like Síle, Donoghue is Dublin-born, and now lives with her partner and their children in … London, Ontario. Love can land you anywhere …

Readers: Adult

Published: 2007

Leave a Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, Canadian, European, Hapa, Indian, Irish

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,