Little Wolves, by Thomas Maltman

Is there actually a mountain on the eastern Minnesota prairie? Did a young man who lived near it intend to commit a murder? Did he intend to kill himself? Did he actually kill himself? Was the man he murdered saint or sinner? How and why did the young priest’s wife end up reliving her mother’s last act?  

We wrestled with these and a batch of other questions as we discussed this intriguing book, and were mixed in our reactions to it. The myths of early Anglo-Saxon literature fit in nicely—the coyote (Maltman calls them “little wolves”) who rescued the human baby, the man who turns into a wolf—and become intertwined with the reality of lost souls in the tiny prairie town, where people still blame dark deeds on the ghosts of the Native American who settled here first.

But some of the themes work, some don't.

Our overriding question was: Where have all the editors gone? This is not the first time we asked this question—many of the books we have read have suffered from the need of an impartial expert to cut unnecessary details and story lines, to help the writer focus.

This could have been a brilliant book—and with more time from an editor, it should have been. Much of the writing is beautiful and the imagery is elegant.  It was an enjoyable read, but not completely satisfying afterward.  Too many themes were only loosely resolved; others were  introduced then dropped, leaving us to wonder what to make of it all. Likewise, some of the characters were weakly drawn, including the teenager Seth, who is at the center of things; the newly minted priest Logan, who could have been fascinating with just a bit more focus; and Clara, who is looking for her own roots by studying ancient literature.

The setting was wonderfully imagined and Maltman makes the community itself a central character, which gives the book much of its strength. The father-son bonding throughout was compelling, especially in the ending, which was far lovelier than we could have expected.

We recommend the book, despite the above reservations, and would love to hear others’ reactions to it.—Patricia Prijatel

Author Kent Haruf

The other morning over coffee and The New York Times, my husband said, "Did you read Kent Haruf died?"  I hadn't, but I wasn't surprised.  I understood his most recent novel, Benediction, was given that title for a reason.

He is one of the few prolific writers of whom I can say that I've read all his books.  And I'm sorry there will be no more.  But I'd love to read at least one again (Plainsong would be my preference) and discuss it with the BB&Bers.  (Also, it would address Ken's lament that we've been reading a disproportionate number of women authors lately. ) :)

Plainsong was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award.  In it, as in all his novels, the style is unadorned; he lets his characters show themselves on the page by what they do and say; we have to get to the bottom of things on our own by observing their behaviors and thinking about them.  He is very much a writer of place: of small town and rural Colorado.  The characters are exactly life sized.  They are ordinary people:  elderly bachelor brothers on a cattle ranch; a pregnant teenager; a lonely and well-intentioned high school teacher; a single-parent dad; two little boys whose mother suffers from depression.  It's in their response to each other that Haruf shows us grace in the most unlikely places.

Even if it doesn't make it onto our official reading list, I highly recommend it to you fiction lovers.  And if you read it, I'd like to hear your impressions.—Sharelle Moranville

A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry

If one had visited urban India circa 1975 for even a month, the careful reading of A Fine Balance would be more credible than that of an armchair traveler. This novel is not for the faint of heart, as it deals realistically with the sadistic and depraved sides of human nature. Mistry brings a mesmerizing style and a heartening since of humor, but, no laughter. 

This work also reveals a compassionate and caring side of human nature and an honest desire to connect with people, especially the four main characters: 

Dina is a young, independently spirited widow who is a skilled seems just an entrepreneur;-

Ishvar is generous and kind to everyone, and constantly encouraging his nephew – 

Omprakash (Om) to loosen up and fly right;

Maneck is a college student who cannot cease dwelling on his idyllic past. 

The foregoing characters' lives meet and eventually mingle and boost one another to a light-hearted and most easy-going state. The first three characters rise above their past and present predicaments, and, with their innate or learned good attitudes, do you go forward. 

As this novel is complex in its style, it is meant to be read twice. — Laurie Jones

You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, by Heather Sellers

St. Timothy’s Books, Brew and Banter book club has just finished reading a fascinating book by Heather Sellers entitled You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know.  The story is a memoir and concentrates on this author’s coming to an understanding of a condition she has known as “face blindness.”  The official term for this condition is prosopagnosia; what it means is that she is unable to put together any memories of people’s faces.  Yes, she sees their eyes, noses, mouths (that’s vision), but cannot put them together in memorable forms (perception).  She recognizes some people by hairstyle, the way they carry themselves or walk, the style of dress they usually wear.  But others – even her own husband – she frequently does not recognize.

What makes the book fascinating is that she does not really understand that she has this condition until she is in her late 30’s, when she is also coming to grips with the fact that her mother is a paranoid schizophrenic.  Her father is an alcoholic who has significant problems of his own.  To say that this woman comes from a dysfunctional background is to understate her childhood. 

Written in a style where the author moves back and forth between the present and the past, we see Ms. Sellers’ childhood and adolescence remembered from her perspective at close to 40 years old.  We feel her pain at shuttling back and forth between living with one parent and then another; her disappointment when neither of her parents will complete college scholarship financial information forms; her heartache at her lack of friends because other kids see her as stuck up when she doesn’t recognize them.  And yet, she never stops loving her parents and trying to understand them.  The story is ultimately one of the power of love and forgiveness to bring redemption and acceptance to troubled relationships.

We enjoyed this book a great deal and would recommend it highly.  The book is well written and makes reading on and on a pleasure, even, and maybe particularly, in the parts where she is finally able to find medical help that explains prosopagnosia. —Jeanie Smith

Zealot, by Reza Aslan

For the past few weeks, the Books, Brew, and Banter crowd has been reading and discussing Zealot:  The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (Random House, July, 2013), by Reza Aslan (a #1 New York Times bestseller, named one of the best books of the year by Booklist and Publishers Weekly).  Of the nine BB&Bers at the wrap-up discussion of Zealot, there were nine thumbs-up. 

Aslan describes himself as “a kid raised in a motley family of lukewarm Muslims and exuberant atheists.” At an evangelical youth camp in northern California when he was a teen, Aslan accepted Jesus Christ as his savior and invested in the literal God-inspired truth of the greatest story ever told.  He went on to evangelize others, including his mother who converted to Christianity.  But years later, as a student of religious studies, Aslan was faced with what he saw as a fact:  much of the Bible could not possibly be literally true.

In his Author Note at the end of the book, he writes, “Ironically, the more I learned about the life of the historical Jesus, the turbulent world in which he lived, and the brutality of the Roman occupation that he defied, the more I was drawn to him.  Indeed, the Jewish peasant and revolutionary who challenged the rule of the most powerful empire the world had ever known and lost became so much more real to me than the detached, unearthly being I had been introduced to in church.  Today, I can confidently say that two decades of rigorous academic research into the origins of Christianity has made me a more genuinely committed disciple of Jesus of Nazareth than I ever was of Jesus Christ.  My hope with this book is to spread the good news of the Jesus of history with the same fervor that I once applied to spreading the story of the Christ.” 

Because Aslan is a terrific writer and a diligent scholar, ordinary readers (not people schooled deeply in history or theology) can finish the book in a kind of “Aha!” place.  Jesus as a particular person, living in a particular time and place, comes alive.  And Aslan has made his case that “Jesus the man is every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ.  He is, in short, someone worth believing in.” 

What may be hard for some readers is learning about all the messiahs that were wandering around that part of the world in those days, and the fractiousness between Jesus’s brother James the Just and Paul of Tarsus.  And the committee decision that led to the Nicene Creed in the 4^th Century.  One element of the creed, the mystery of the Holy Trinity, was a committee effort to please everybody.  As he grew older, Aslan found the complexity of the Trinity a stumbling block, and it became important factor in his decision to return to the Muslim faith of his roots.

Zealot is a page-turner that gives a vivid sense of the historical Jesus and a crisp, succinct explanation of what happened in the church's development between the crucifixion of Jesus and the Council of Nicea.—Sharelle Moranville.

Say You're One of Them, by Uwem Akpan

Say You’re One of Them was the May read for Books, Brew, and Banter.  Written by Uwem Akpan, published in 2008, chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club Selection in 2009, it shows daily life in turbulent, war-torn, Africa. 

In five short stories, all set in different parts of Africa, Akpan, an African Jesuit priest educated in America, shows us life through the eyes of African children. In “An Ex-mas Feast,” Akpan pours out Nairobian poverty on the page so vividly that it takes a reader’s breath away.  In “In My Parents’ Bedroom,” he shows us a loving, educated, enlightened Rwandan family ripped apart by tribalism.  In “Luxurious Hearses,” he narrates the ultimate sacrifice of a teenage boy to the bloodlust of people running for their lives in western Africa.

It’s a difficult book to read.  Because of the content, sometimes continuing to turn the pages is an effort.  And because Akpan sprinkles the stories generously with the mélange of languages spoken in Africa, parsing the meaning of what people are saying can be hard too.  But on those difficult-to-turn-and-understand pages, Akpan always splashes a generous measure of the best of humanity:  love, loyalty, responsibility, empathy, self-sacrifice, and faith.

In these stories of children’s lives, general themes emerge:  the variety of religions and languages in Africa, the power of faith, the role of the media, the relationship between men and women, the struggle of families to stay together, the driving force of the sex trade, the relentless force of tribalism, and always the plight of the children. 

Deacon Jeanie Smith described the book as “beautifully written and utterly heartbreaking” – as the kind of book a person can’t just read.  Afterward, there’s the need to do something. —Sharelle Moranville

Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner

During most of July, the Books, Brew, and Banter group read and discussed Wallace Stegner’s 1987 novel Crossing to Safety.  Although Stegner made his literary debut with Remembering Laughter in 1937 (set in Iowa Farm country where Stegner was born), and wrote prolifically and with distinction for fifty years, most of the BB&B group had never read his fiction.  And, in the end, everybody agreed that we had found a treasure in Crossing to Safety. 

The story begins in 1938 and ends in August, 1972.  It’s narrated by Larry Morgan, a novelist and academic.  In 1938, Larry and his wife Sally, of modest means and low on the academic totem pole, meet Sid and Charity, also low on the academic totem pole but from backgrounds of immense wealth.  The couples quickly become close friends and remain so until the story’s end.  Through Larry’s eyes, we follow the birth of children, academic careers, literary success and failure, illness, recovery, and death.

Although the narrator is usually the most important character in a novel, in this case, the reader soon figures out that while Larry Morgan is telling this story, it ultimately belongs to Charity – much like Nick Caraway tells Gatsby’s story in The Great Gatsby.  And like Gatsby, Charity is larger than life.  She is epic.  Iconic.  Driven.  Difficult to understand.  Awe inspiring, in her way.  And at the end, the reader is left a bit shaken and full of questions.  What does “crossing to safety” mean?  Who has managed to do it?  How have they managed to do it?

Written in really lovely prose, the joy of the book is as much in the language as the action.  It’s a sensitive, imaginative look at American academia over thirty years, an examination of gender roles, a depiction of mid-century American values, and an interesting slice of American history. — Sharelle Moranville.

A Call to Action, by Jimmy Carter

I have read many of the two dozen plus books written by President Carter over the course of his career, many of which I have found to be most enjoyable and easy reads, and all of his writings are moored by a deep-seated belief in the equality of all people.

While his new book continues in the tradition of that belief, the members of St. Timothy’s Books, Brew, and Banter book club unanimously agree that it certainly isn’t an enjoyable read as he grimly tackles head-on the subject of the subjugation of women in cultures throughout the world.  Since leaving the White House in 1981, he and his wife Rosalynn founded the Carter Center, dedicated to advancing peace and health worldwide, and they have been firsthand witnesses to the shocking and disturbing human rights abuses inflicted on women. He carefully outlines that women and girls are routinely deprived of education, forced to suffer servitude and child marriage, female genital mutilation, sexual assault and rape, and the undercurrent of discrimination that results in fewer promotions, lower pay and unequal representation in business and politics.

He examines the entrenched links between interpretations of religious texts of Christians, Muslims and Jews that exalt the status of men in the eyes of God, and connects the problems to the world’s excessive use of war and violence. In particular, he reports, that since the birth of the United Nations, American forces have been involved in combat in over twenty three nations, evidence that our previously firm commitment to peace and human rights has been largely abandoned, increasing the suffering of the innocent and defenseless.

All this makes one sad, angry, and horrified. On the other hand, though, he chronicles the Carter Center’s subsequent good works around the globe, ranging from campaigns to eradicate Guinea worm in Ghana to monitoring elections in Egypt. President Carter goes into the specifics of some important work being done, and gives numerous examples of dedicated people throughout the world who have struggled and often righted wrongs.

He concludes by listing twenty-three calls to action and invites us all to participate. It gives one hope that the world can be made better for struggling women and girls. A tough read, but a must read. —Kenneth N. Johnson, Ph.D.

Orange Is the New Black, by Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman could be your neighbor, your daughter, your best friend, or you.  After graduating from Smith College, Kerman longed for an adventure, and she found it as a courier for a drug lord. She was a small part of an international operation, but ten years later, her youthful lark landed her in prison in Danbury, Connecticut, close in miles to her friends in New York and Boston, yet eons away in the life she faced.

Stripped of her clothes, belongings, and dignity, Kerman learned what it is like to be a prisoner in 21st Century America.

Our favorite part of the book was Kerman's acceptance of her fate and empathy for the women she lived with—she seemed to completely enjoy many of them, while acknowledging impatience with those who kept making poor choices and endangering their entire families. Kerman writes with wisdom about her own poor choices and how they not only hurt her and those she loved, but ultimately hurt the women she was living with, many of whom were caught in the drug trade she joined just to have fun.

She shows how dehumanizing and pointless prison sentences are for many of these women who were given minimal rehabilitation or education and treated like they were less than human, often because of crimes in which they were more victim than criminal.  

As part of the discussion, we tasted Kerman's version of prison cheesecake and agreed it was surprisingly tasty.

We recommend the book, and those of us who have seen the Netflix series recommend it as well, although it often wanders away from the storyline of the book. Seeing the filmed version helped us visualize the prison and its women.  — Patricia Prijatel