Flight Behavior / Barbara Kingsolver

The monarch butterfly of Eastern North America typically migrates thousands of miles in order to overwinter in the mountains of Mexico. This journey is all the more miraculous since the route is completed by several generations of the insect (so there is no “memory” of the route by any single butterfly). But this winter, in Kingsolver’s most recent work of fiction, Flight Behavior, due to fluctuating temperatures and other meteorological events tied to global warming, masses of orange monarchs drape the trees on the mountain overlooking the Turnbows’ farmstead in the Appalachian foothills of Tennessee. Their sudden and unexpected appearance is seen as a sign of God by some, and a harbinger of environmental collapse by others.

Entomologist Ovid Byron comes to Feathertown, TN, to study the monarchs, and Kingsolver uses his voice to deliver sometimes preachy sermons on how man is destroying his natural surroundings. (An interesting point that Kingsolver makes is that preserving the environment is often defined in terms that are class-based and elitist—she rather cleverly runs through a list of “things to do to save the world” and has her local protagonist discard them one by one—“Fly less?... I never fly”. As if responsibility for saving the environment is only for those who can afford to give things up.)

I liked this story, but not enough. Some of it dragged-- the scenes at the Dollar Store and the thrift store, for example, were just deadly, but maybe that’s because I consider an actual trip to these places an activity bordering on torture.

Barbara Kingsolver writes beautifully and her characters are well-developed, but sometimes the tension just wasn’t there. By the end of the novel, things start moving again, and the final scene was almost Biblical in how it unfolded. Reading Kingsolver is always rewarding, I just didn’t think that this effort was up to her usual standard.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

So Much for That / Lionel Shriver

This novel comes from the 2005 Orange Prize winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin , a disturbing book in which a parent with ambivalent feelings towards motherhood deals with the aftermath of a Columbine-style school killing perpetrated by her son. Lionel Shriver has said that she prefers to create characters that are hard to love, and So Much for That certainly contains some flinty characters, who although they may be hard to love, are nevertheless very believable. The topic this time is healthcare in America. Shep is all ready to launch into an exotic early retirement on the island of Pemba off the eastern coast of Africa, but when his wife reveals a diagnosis of mesothelioma, he must hold on to his job to maintain family health coverage to see her through her devastating illness. His work colleague and friend, Jackson, experiences a medical dilemma completely of his own doing, which proves to be his un doing. Jackson's daughter suffers from an unusual genetic disorde...

Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

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