Peachy Reads

Sarah’s Key charts two parallel stories—one from Nazi-occupied Paris and the other sixty years later. The common element is an apartment on the rue de Saintonge and its horrible secret that links two families a generation apart. The story begins with events set in motion by the horrific roundup of Parisian Jews during an initiative known as the Vel’ d’Hiv, (named for the Vélodrome d’hiver) in which Jewish families were warehoused in an indoor stadium under the most inhumane conditions by the French police (not the occupying German Nazis) until they were shipped off to internment camps and, in most cases, their eventual deaths. Julia is a journalist who uncovers the details linking 1942 and 2002, a link that involves her immediate family. The tragic secrets of rue de Saintonge are gradually revealed until the end of the novel where a tidy, but nevertheless quite plausible resolution, pulls all the narrative strands together. This is a powerful book, full of emotion, full of grief. The c...

Okay, so I wanted to find out more about Aimée Leduc, the Parisian gumshoe I was introduced to in Murder in Passy , which was the eleventh in the bestselling series. I rewound to the debut novel, Murder in the Marais . The plot is an interesting (but perhaps overly complicated) tangle of events centered on the Parisian Jewish community involving several murders, two in contemporary times, others dating to World War II. There are Nazi collaborators, a secret contemporary German organization called the Werewolves, French neonazis, corrupt politicians, and more. I was a little bewildered by language issues— Cara Black liberally sprinkles her dialogue with French interjections, and it all seems a bit faux . French Neonazis spout German catchphrases in a meeting in Paris. I suppose this is possible, though I’m not sure why German would be the lingua franca of skinheads just because the Third Reich was German. (I would find it similarly remarkable that German would be used much in mee...

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...

I really wanted to like this novel. I’ve been captivated by the Scandinavian thriller phenom that has put authors like Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and Lars Kepler on international bestseller lists and the top of public library circulation logs. Jo Nesbø is a Norwegian crime writer whose police inspector Harry Hole (last name is two syllables) is an interesting character. Jo Nesbø has now written seven novels with Harry Hole, and while I may have missed some of the background to characters and context in the series by jumping in with The Snowman , the main difficulty I had seemed to be with the English translation. When a novel “feels” like it’s been translated from a foreign language, then there’s an issue with the translation. I felt that the novel was a slow-starter, and I think much of this has to do with the rough translation. Sometimes it was fine, other times it was so clunky it felt like an unedited term paper. I tried to collect some examples of weird translator errors whic...

Snakes alive! Judging from the cover of this memoir, you might guess you were in for a book-length swampy herpetological tour… which is not actually the case. It’s mostly the story of a father-son road trip, the attempt of a grown man to peel the layers away from his aging father to see why he was so “out there,” so unconventional, such an enigma in his life growing up. His father was a naturalist of sorts, and one of his lifetime passions (it's a passion when you can barely eke a living out of it) was surveying the surviving numbers of the endangered copperbelly water snake in remote areas in southern Michigan. After living through his father's substance abuse, a messy divorce, and a childhood salvaged by the more reliable care (and income) of his teacher mother, the author approaches his father later in life to try to understand him better and repair their tattered relationship. He meets him in his former swampy stomping grounds, where he gets an idea and a reluctant apprecia...

Redmond O’Hanlon seems like a somewhat unlikely candidate for adventurer-- for fifteen years he had the rather sedentary job of book reviewer at the Times Literary Supplement and holds an advanced degree in literature (his doctoral thesis was titled 'Changing scientific concepts of nature in the English novel, 1850-1920'). His journeys into some of the remotest jungle regions on earth (Borneo, the Amazon, the Congo) might be one answer to the question, “What should I do with my English degree?” In Trouble Again is the record of a trip (with a rather spurious research goal) into the upper reaches of the Amazon, the "Again" in the title referring to his first book chronicling a similar (mis)adventure in Borneo. My interest in O'Hanlon's book was sparked after reading Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder . She listed it as one of the sources she consulted while gathering background on the Amazon, and it certainly is a rollicking good read. Redmond and a motley crew...

My daughter is reading The Catcher in the Rye in 10th grade English this year, so I thought I’d pick it up again— the years have dulled my memory, and I wanted to revisit this classic, a book which some have labeled the first ever Young Adult novel. Published in 1951, the troubled adolescent voice of Holden Caulfield still rings true all these years later. Sure, the teenage vernacular has changed and changed again in the intervening years, but Holden still has a resoundingly authentic voice that surely must be one of the secrets to the novel’s seemingly eternal relevance and longevity. In spite of his impatience and immaturity, it’s Holden’s interactions with people—Ackley, Spencer, the nuns at the lunch counter, old Sally, even Mr. Antolini, that lend his character further depth and humanity. But it is his relationship with his little sister Phoebe that is so real and so touching that I don’t think the novel would have been nearly so powerful without her. The image of her dragging a ...