Froelich's Ladder by Jamie Duclos-Yourdon

Uncle Froelich nurses a decades-old family grudge from his perch atop a giant ladder. When he’s discovered missing, his nephew embarks on a rain-soaked trek across a nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest landscape to find him, accompanied by an ornery girl with a most unfortunate name. In their encounters with Confederate assassins, European expatriates, and a general store magnate, this fairytale twist on the American dream explores the conflicts between loyalty and ambition and our need for human connection, even at the highest rungs. 

 Goodreads description

This is a tall tale, literally in the case of the fourth highest ladder the world has ever seen. And it is in the tradition of American tall tales - Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, etc - a story form suited to the bravura of the frontier world in which Froelich's Ladder is placed.

After his brother takes the girl he fancies, Froelich climbs up the ladder in a huff and stays there, growing food between the rungs and communicating with his brother and then his two nephews by a sort of morse code. Then one day the knocking from on high stops: Froelich is missing and one of his nephews sets out to find him while the other props up the ladder.

The hunt for Froelich takes the central character and the reader into a wild west where the fanciful and the real exist alongside each other. Parents be warned: the story turns from picaresque folklore to the threat of sexual and/or physical violence at times.

One of the best things about this book is that it features two strong-willed independent female characters more than succeeding in a man's world. Something I always like to see. 

Whilst the final resolution(s) seemed a bit rushed to me, this is an entertaining undemanding read.

I received this book free from the publisher via Netgalley in return for a fair review. 

The Improbable Wonders of Moojie Littleman by Robin Gregory

Moojie Littleman is not just another orphan with extraterrestrial friends, he is not just a kid who falls into a series of magical, mystical misadventures involving love and family and watermelons. He is, above all, the most unlikely and powerful hero ever known. 

Moral allegory, mysticism, and lyrical prose, THE IMPROBABLE WONDERS OF MOOJIE LITTLEMAN tells the story of a disabled boy who is sent to St. Isidore's Fainting Goat Dairy, where determination to “belong” fuels his self-discovery. A surprising destiny awaits him if he can survive one last terrifying trial.

Goodreads description

Robin Gregory is a member of the Magic Realism Books Facebook Group I run and I always enjoy her contributions to discussions there, so I leaped at the chance to read and review her book. One of the issues we often discuss is where to place our books, this question is very relevant to The Improbable Wonders of Moojie Littleman. It could be fantasy, science fiction or magic realism. It could be for adults or for young adults or middle-graders.  

The story's hero is a disabled boy who has some magical powers - the ability to heal being one and occasionally the power of levitation - but those wonders really don't help him much with his troubles. Having lost his parents twice (he is an orphan and then his adoptive mother dies and his father deserts him), Moojie is desperately in need of a family. He grows up with his gruff and unsympathetic grandfather, with whom he has a complex relationship. He also has an interfering aunt, who at first seems a caricature but who develops into someone as complex as his grandfather. 

When Moojie meets the lighteaters (or hostiles as his grandfather calls them), he decides he wants them to be his family instead. They are exotic, so philosophic they talk in riddles a lot of the time, and then there is a beautiful lighteater that the adolescent Moojie falls in love with. In the end when the lighteaters are about to leave, Moojie is forced to decide which "family" he wishes to be with. I was struck that Moojie's feeling are often shared by children, who wonder what it would be like to have another family than their own.

I very much liked the complex characterization of the key characters in the novel and the way the complexity is revealed as Moojie's own character grows. The lighteaters however are less developed, partly because of the riddles and partly because of their otherness. 

The book is full of philosophy and lessons - the role of forgiveness being the most prominent - and I can see why some people have compared it with Paul Coelho's work. This is done without being heavy-handed, something I found offputting in The Alchemist. I am sure a lot of parents will encourage their children to read this novel for that reason.

But were my son in middle grade I would not buy it for him. When he was twelve John was a picky reader and unless immediately taken by the story would abandon it. Most of the book's pacing is slow and although it really picks up at the end and gets exciting, my son would have given up by then. The other reason is the language. Gregory writes beautiful poetic prose, full of lovely descriptions. But there are a lot of words I did not know in the book and which I wasn't always able to work out from their context.  I assume these words are American dialect words and John and I are British. Maybe the publisher might like to consider a glossary or similar for the British market.  

Those quibbles aside there is much to love in this book, as shown by the list of awards it has received (current finalist Indiefab Best Books of the Year, Library Journal Indie California Book Collection 2016, Gelett Burgess Children's Book of the Year Award 2015, Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Books Dec/2015, The Wishing Shelf Adult Fiction Award 2015).

I received a free copy of the book from the author in return for a fair review.

Music of Sacred Lakes by Laura Cowan

Peter Sanskevicz doesn’t belong anywhere. He doesn’t want the sixth-generation family farm his great great-grandfather unwittingly stole from its Odawa owners, and can’t continue his jobs serving “fudgies,” tourists in Northern Michigan who seem more at home than he is. He can’t seem to take charge of things or do anything but make a mess. Then, Peter accidentally kills a girl.

Seeing his life is at risk, his friend takes him to his uncle, a pipe carrier of the Odawa tribe, who tells him he must live by the shores of Lake Michigan until the lake speaks to him. Peter lives and loves and rages by the shores of the great lake, haunted by its rich beauty, by strange images and sounds that begin to pursue him through his waking and sleeping hours, and by the spirit of the dead girl, who seems to be trying to help him. One day, he finally finds an inner silence. And then, he hears what the lake has to say to him. A story about reconnecting with the source of your life and your joy, Music of Sacred Lakes gives voice to the spirit of the land and lakes that gave birth to us all.

Part of the Goodreads Description 

This is the latest in my series of reviews of books by members of the Magic Realism Facebook Group and it shows what an interesting bunch we are. 

The Goodreads description goes on to describe Laura as an American Fabulist and a writer of spiritually-oriented magical realism, literary fantasy, and visionary fiction.  I confess I am not much up on these sub-genres and American fabulism was new to me. Now despite a bit of online searching I am not much wiser, indeed the definitions of fabulism I found suggested that it was just another word for magic realism. Ah well, let's leave that there. I am sure someone out there would like to put me right.

The spiritual element in the book is well to the fore. The young man at the centre of the novel is lost spiritually and his journey of spiritual discovery is the subject of the story. There is a lot of frustrated anger on his part, as he hits out literally and verbally. He finds himself through listening to the lake, as the old pipe carrier instructed him. The other instructor in Peter's transformation is the dead girl who comes to him in dreams and tells hims that It's okay.... It's all lake. As if to emphasize this the girl's name is Marissa (meaning: of the sea). 

At about the same time as I was reading this book I was also reading Living With A Wild God: A Non-believer's Search for the Truth About Everything by Barbara Ehrenreich. In the latter book the author recounts her experience of the wild god  - the Other - manifesting itself through nature. Ehrenreich is an atheist but a mystical one. The Christian mysticism which Laura Cowan describes in this book is very similar. It requires a sublimation of the self in the whole, symbolized by the lake but actually meaning all of nature - it's all lake. It is interesting that Cowan feels it necessary to use the native American intermediary and his traditional beliefs to help Peter discover or rediscover the wild god. 

I was having an interesting conversation with a fellow writer the other day over a coffee. She said that she had seen a rise in the number of young authors writing magic realism. We agreed that one for reason for this is that in this agnostic, even atheist, world many people are looking for magic, for something unexplained and unpredictable. I argued that for many people the "realist" approach is two-dimensional and excludes some of the most important experiences in people's lives. Some theists would argue that magic realism is an inappropriate description for books featuring Christian or other religious beliefs, but I have no problem with it and I think Music of Sacred Lakes is a good example of why magic realism and Christian mysticism sit well together. 

In a way not much actually happens in the novel - the turmoil is almost entirely internal. There is the presence of two very different young women who in different ways are attracted to Peter and are attractive to him. However the writer does not make too much of this area of potential tension. Personally I would have liked to have seen more made of the relationships, if only in the way the two girls impact on Peter's awakening.

The writing is positively poetic at times, but also tends to be a bit repetitive. This is a book which you should allow to wash over you - rather like Peter's lake in fact - and you may well find yourself pondering the profound.

The Silver Cloud Cafe by Alfredo Vea

The Silver Cloud Cafe is a novel that goes beyond and beneath. Beyond and beneath the glossy surface of San Francisco. Beyond and beneath the clean-scrubbed image of American life. It goes to the Mission District, where two neon angels stand watch over the ramshackle cantina known as Raphael's Silver Cloud Cafe and where the lost and lonely, desperate and dispossessed, come for a meager portion of solace and salvation in the form of companionship, drink, and sex. It goes to the dark waters under the Fourth Street Bridge, where the corpse of a failed priest surfaces, and to the jailhouse, where a nattily dressed midget takes credit and demands punishment for the crime. This amazing novel is at once a gripping murder mystery that probes two macabre killings forty years apart and a panoramic meditation on the magical, mystical mix of race and culture in America. Its spellbinding story of intertwining guilt and innocence, crime and punishment, ranges over the century, from the bloody Christero Wars of the Mexican Revolution to the stifling rigidities of class and caste in the Philippines to the bitter harvests of migrants in the California farmlands to the feeding frenzy and human downsizing of the 1990s. Its characters include a Chicano lawyer and a Jewish investigator who have seen too much and believe too little; a Mexican priest torn by twin lusts for sex and vengeance; a black ex-boxer who is down but not out; a bar owner with a sense of divine mission; and a host of other unforgettable men and women who join in a superbly orchestrated symphony of voices and visions.

Goodreads Description

The Irish comedian Dave Alan told a joke about a priest telling a girl that in order to be married in white the bride needed to be a virgin. The girl replied that her wedding dress would be white, but with wee spots of blue.  I feel very much the same about this novel. Quite simply it is a masterpiece which will stay with me forever, but it is a flawed masterpiece, but not so much as to mar the book for me.  

It is perhaps easiest to start with the flaws, as, I'm afraid, does  the book. The opening chapter focuses on the detective inspecting the body of a murder victim and undertaking an unsatisfactory interrogation of a witness to the killing. I enjoy American crime fiction and like its sparseness and wit. But then I was then hit in the second chapter by a very different style. Vea seemed to be setting another scene - a picture of San Francisco taking from street level, reminding me at times of Helprin's Winter's Tale and as in that novel I found the style too rich for my liking - too many adjectives, too much political soapboxing,  the way some of the speech of the characters disappears into philosophical mumbo jumbo (personally I prefer my magic realism in actions rather than speech) and too many lists (you see what I did then, clever eh!) .  

But then the real story kicks in - that of the young boy who would grow up to become the lawyer and the itinerant Mexican and Filipino farm workers who were his stand-in family. As the Goodreads description makes clear the cast is a wonderful one, very believable and at the same time somehow magical. At times with these larger-than-life characters I found myself thinking of Carter's Nights at the Circus. The story is a dark one in some ways, these are men overworked, despised, victims of violence without a chance of justice, with no future and yet there is a camaraderie and gentle love between them that is quite wonderful - such as the scene where all the men take a day off to go to the boy's school to be fathers to him. 

The magic realism flows naturally in this tale. These people live in an alien world to ours and in which magic is real. It is a world that the lawyer has forgotten, and with it the terrible event of 1959 which sets his friends fleeing across America. But that terrible deed is the reason behind the strange murder of the priest and the lawyer must remember his past and in so doing remember too why he became a defence lawyer in the first place. The magic and the diverse crowd of dispossessed come together in the Silver Cloud Cafe in 1993,  a place guarded by two neon angels. The scene is set for a marriage and two deaths.

I loved this book, despite its faults. I loved its characters, the way the narrative (once it got going) built across time, the poetry, and its humanity. And I loved the way the way the author wasn't afraid of dealing with love and faith.  Maybe a book can't be this wonderful without flaws.

by Zoe Brooks