2012 Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced – New York Times
The 2012 Pulitzer Prizes, celebrating achievement in newspaper and online journalism, literature, nonfiction and musical composition, were announced Monday afternoon at Columbia University in New York. The prizes, given annually since 1917, are awarded in 21 categories.
No fiction winner, but there is a nonfiction winner, poetry winner, and a biography winner. Even better: the poetry winner came from an independent press!
Title: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened 
Author: Jenny Lawson / The Bloggess
Genre: nonfiction
Publisher: Amy Einhorn Putnam
Publishing Date: April 17
Summary: For fans of Tina Fey and David Sedaris-Internet star Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, makes her literary debut.
When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father (a professional taxidermist who created dead-animal hand puppets) and a childhood of wearing winter shoes made out of used bread sacks. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it.
Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter are the perfect comedic foils to her absurdities, and help her to uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments-the ones we want to pretend never happened-are the very same moments that make us the people we are today.
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Title: White Horse
Author: Alex Adams
Genre: fiction, post-apocalyptic
Publisher: Atria / Emily Bestler Books
Publishing Date: April17
Summary: Thirty-year-old Zoe leads an ordinary life until the end of the world arrives. She is cleaning cages and floors at Pope Pharmaceuticals when the President of the United States announces that human beings are no longer a viable species. When Zoe realizes that everyone she loves is disappearing, she starts running. Scared and alone in a shockingly changed world, she embarks on a remarkable journey of survival and redemption. Along the way, Zoe comes to see that humans are not defined by their genetic code, but rather by their actions and choices. White Horse offers hope for a broken world, where love can lead to the most unexpected places.
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Title: The Innocent 
Author: David Baldacci
Genre: mystery
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Publishing Date: April 17
Summary: It begins with a hit gone wrong. Robie is dispatched to eliminate a target unusually close to home in Washington, D.C. But something about this mission doesn’t seem right to Robie, and he does the unthinkable. He refuses to kill. Now, Robie becomes a target himself and must escape from his own people.
Fleeing the scene, Robie crosses paths with a wayward teenage girl, a fourteen-year-old runaway from a foster home. But she isn’t an ordinary runaway-her parents were murdered, and her own life is in danger. Against all of his professional habits, Robie rescues her and finds he can’t walk away. He needs to help her.
Even worse, the more Robie learns about the girl, the more he’s convinced she is at the center of a vast cover-up, one that may explain her parents’ deaths and stretch to unimaginable levels of power.
Now, Robie may have to step out of the shadows in order to save this girl’s life . . . and perhaps his own.
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Remember to vote for me in the Independent Book Blogger Awards!
Anyone getting ready to pick up their World Book Night books? I’m looking forward to the event!
Happy reading!
Title: Angels of Vengeance 
Author: John Birmingham
Genre: sci fi
Publisher: Random House
Publishing Date: April 10
Summary: When an inexplicable wave of energy slammed into North America, millions died. In the rest of the world, wars erupted, borders vanished, and the powerful lost their grip on power. Against this backdrop, with a conflicted U.S. president struggling to make momentous decisions in Seattle and a madman fomenting rebellion in Texas, three women are fighting their own battles—for survival, justice, and revenge.
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Title: The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
Author: Jonathan Gottschall
Genre: nonfiction
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publishing Date: April 10
Summary: Humans live in landscapes of make-believe. We spin fantasies. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and criminal trials unfold as narratives. Yet the world of story has long remained an undiscovered and unmapped country. It’s easy to say that humans are “wired” for story, but why?
In this delightful and original book, Jonathan Gottschall offers the first unified theory of storytelling. He argues that stories help us navigate life’s complex social problems—just as flight simulators prepare pilots for difficult situations. Storytelling has evolved, like other behaviors, to ensure our survival.
Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, Gottschall tells us what it means to be a storytelling animal. Did you know that the more absorbed you are in a story, the more it changes your behavior? That all children act out the same kinds of stories, whether they grow up in a slum or a suburb? That people who read more fiction are more empathetic?
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Title: Paris in Love: A Memoir 
Author: Eloisa James
Genre: nonfiction
Publisher: Random House
Publishing Date: April 3
Summary: With no classes to teach, no committee meetings to attend, no lawn to mow or cars to park, Eloisa revels in the ordinary pleasures of life—discovering corner museums that tourists overlook, chronicling Frenchwomen’s sartorial triumphs, walking from one end of Paris to another. She copes with her Italian husband’s notions of quality time; her two hilarious children, ages eleven and fifteen, as they navigate schools—not to mention puberty—in a foreign language; and her mother-in-law Marina’s raised eyebrow in the kitchen (even as Marina overfeeds Milo, the family dog).
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Are you a mystery fan? Simon & Schuster’s Atria Mystery Tour information is up – follow the authors and books on their tour across the country!
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ABA announced their Indie Choice winners!
Happy reading!
Title: Stay Close 
Author: Harlan Coben
Genre: mystery
Publisher: Dutton
Publishing Date: March 20
Summary: Megan is a suburban soccer mom who once upon a time walked on the wild side. Now she’s got two kids, a perfect husband, a picket fence, and a growing sense of dissatisfaction. Ray used to be a talented documentary photographer, but at age forty he finds himself in a dead- end job posing as a paparazzo pandering to celebrity-obsessed rich kids. Jack is a detective who can’t let go of a cold case-a local husband and father disappeared seventeen years ago, and Jack spends the anniversary every year visiting a house frozen in time, the missing man’s family still waiting, his slippers left by the recliner as if he might show up any moment to step into them.
Three people living lives they never wanted, hiding secrets that even those closest to them would never suspect, will find that the past doesn’t recede. Even as the terrible consequences of long-ago events crash together in the present and threaten to ruin lives, they will come to the startling realization that they may not want to forget the past at all. And as each confronts the dark side of the American Dream- the boredom of a nice suburban life, the excitement of temptation, the desperation and hunger that can lurk behind even the prettiest facades- they will discover the hard truth that the line between one kind of life and another can be as whisper-thin as a heartbeat.
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Title: The Good Father
Author: Noah Hawley
Genre: fiction
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publishing Date: March 20
Summary: An intense, psychological novel about one doctor’s suspense-filled quest to unlock the mind of a suspected political assassin: his twenty-year old son.
As the Chief of Rheumatology at Columbia Presbyterian, Dr. Paul Allen’s specialty is diagnosing patients with conflicting symptoms, patients other doctors have given up on. He lives a contented life in Westport with his second wife and their twin sons—hard won after a failed marriage earlier in his career that produced a son named Daniel. In the harrowing opening scene of this provocative and affecting novel, Dr. Allen is home with his family when a televised news report announces that the Democratic candidate for president has been shot at a rally, and Daniel is caught on video as the assassin.
Daniel Allen has always been a good kid—a decent student, popular—but, as a child of divorce, used to shuttling back and forth between parents, he is also something of a drifter. Which may be why, at the age of nineteen, he quietly drops out of Vassar and begins an aimless journey across the United States, during which he sheds his former skin and eventually even changes his name to Carter Allen Cash.
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Title: Titanic Tragedy: A New Look at the Lost Liner 
Author: John Maxtone-Graham
Genre: nonfiction
Publisher: WW Norton & Company
Publishing Date: March 19
Summary: This is a book unlike any other. Rather than offering simply a detailed retelling of the Titanic sinking on her maiden voyage, John Maxtone-Graham devotes his considerable knowledge and impeccable prose to a discussion of salient, provocative, and rarely investigated components of the story, including dramatic survivors accounts of the events of the fateful night, the role of newly in-vented wireless telecommunication in the disaster, the construction and its ramifications at the famous Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, and the dawn rendezvous with the rescue ship Carpathia. Richly written and vividly detailed, this is the book Titanic buffs have been waiting for.
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And now for some really big news of the week about upcoming 2012/2013 books!
Happy reading!
Title: The Gods of Gotham 
Author: Lyndsay Faye
Genre: mystery
Publisher: Penguin
Publishing Date: March 15
Summary: 1845. New York City forms its first police force. The great potato famine hits Ireland. These two seemingly disparate events will change New York City. Forever.
Timothy Wilde tends bar near the Exchange, fantasizing about the day he has enough money to win the girl of his dreams. But when his dreams literally incinerate in a fire devastating downtown Manhattan, he finds himself disfigured, unemployed, and homeless. His older brother obtains Timothy a job in the newly minted NYPD, but he is highly skeptical of this new “police force.” And he is less than thrilled that his new beat is the notoriously down-and-out Sixth Ward-at the border of Five Points, the world’s most notorious slum.
One night while making his rounds, Wilde literally runs into a little slip of a girl-a girl not more than ten years old-dashing through the dark in her nightshift . . . covered head to toe in blood.
Timothy knows he should take the girl to the House of Refuge, yet he can’t bring himself to abandon her. Instead, he takes her home, where she spins wild stories, claiming that dozens of bodies are buried in the forest north of 23rd Street. Timothy isn’t sure whether to believe her or not, but, as the truth unfolds, the reluctant copper star finds himself engaged in a battle for justice that nearly costs him his brother, his romantic obsession, and his own life.
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Title: Some Assembly Required
Author: Anne Lamott
Genre: nonfiction
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publishing Date: March 20
Summary: In Some Assembly Required, Anne Lamott enters a new and unexpected chapter of her own life: grandmotherhood.
Stunned to learn that her son, Sam, is about to become a father at nineteen, Lamott begins a journal about the first year of her grandson Jax’s life.
In careful and often hilarious detail, Lamott and Sam-about whom she first wrote so movingly in Operating Instructions-struggle to balance their changing roles with the demands of college and work, as they both forge new relationships with Jax’s mother, who has her own ideas about how to raise a child. Lamott writes about the complex feelings that Jax fosters in her, recalling her own experiences with Sam when she was a single mother. Over the course of the year, the rhythms of life, death, family, and friends unfold in surprising and joyful ways.
By turns poignant and funny, honest and touching, Some Assembly Required is the true story of how the birth of a baby changes a family-as this book will change everyone who reads it.
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Title: The Book of Jonas 
Author: Stephen Dau
Genre: fiction
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Publishing Date: March 15
Summary: Jonas is fifteen when his family is killed during an errant U.S. military operation in an unnamed Muslim country. With the help of an international relief organization, he is sent to America, where he struggles to assimilate-foster family, school, a first love. Eventually, he tells a court-mandated counselor and therapist about a U.S. soldier, Christopher Henderson, responsible for saving his life on the tragic night in question. Christopher’s mother, Rose, has dedicated her life to finding out what really happened to her son, who disappeared after the raid in which Jonas’ village was destroyed. When Jonas meets Rose, a shocking and painful secret gradually surfaces from the past, and builds to a shattering conclusion that haunts long after the final page. Told in spare, evocative prose, The Book of Jonas is about memory, about the terrible choices made during war, and about what happens when foreign disaster appears at our own doorstep. It is a rare and virtuosic novel from an exciting new writer to watch.
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Title: The Girl Next Door 
Author: Brad Parks
Genre: mystery
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publishing Date: March 13
Summary: Reading his own newspaper’s obituaries, veteran reporter Carter Ross comes across that of a woman named Nancy Marino, who was the victim of a hit-and-run while she was on the job delivering copies of that very paper, the Eagle-Examiner. Struck by the opportunity to write a heroic piece about an everyday woman killed too young, he heads to her wake to gather tributes and anecdotes. It’s the last place Ross expects to find controversy—which is exactly what happens when one of Nancy’s sisters convinces him that the accident might not have been accidental at all.
It turns out that the kind and generous Nancy may have made a few enemies, starting with her boss at the diner where she was a part-time waitress, and even including the publisher of the Eagle-Examiner. Carter’s investigation of this seemingly simple story soon has him in big trouble with his full-time editor and sometime girlfriend, Tina Thompson, not to mention the rest of his bosses at the paper, but he can’t let it go—the story is just too good, and it keeps getting better. But will his nose for trouble finally take him too far?
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Feel free to browse various publishers’ websites and the Publisher’s Weekly website for more publications! There are several upcoming books out for the pickings this week!
Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA by Bonnie J. Rough 
When Bonnie J. Rough receives the test results that confirm she is a carrier of the genetic condition hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia, or H.E.D., it propels her on a journey deep into her family’s past in the American West.
At first glance, H.E.D. seems only to be a superficial condition: a peculiar facial bone structure, sparse hair, few teeth, and an inability to sweat. But a closer look reveals the source of a lifetime of infections, breathing problems, and drug dependency for Bonnie’s grandfather Earl, who suffered from the disorder. After a boyhood as a small-town oddity and an adulthood fraught with disaster, Earl died penniless and alone at the age of 49. Bonnie’s mother was left with an inheritance that included not just the gene for H.E.D., but also the emotional pain that came from witnessing her father’s misery.
As Bonnie and her husband consider becoming parents themselves, their biological legacy haunts every decision. The availability of genetic testing gives them new choices to make, choices more excruciating than any previous generation could have imagined. Ultimately, Carrier is a story of a modern moral crisis, one that reveals the eternal tension between past and future.
This book is for anyone who is pro-choice, a supporter of reproductive rights, or on the fence about these issues and how to deal with them. I think even pro-life supporters could take a peek at this, too! There is enough conflict in here for every reader to understand that this type of dilemma can be confusing and heartbreaking.
Rough brilliantly crafted three narratives – with hers as the main thread – in this braided-essay style memoir. The reader is introduced to the medical dilemma, hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia, that haunts the piece and the minds of each narrative. We meet the suffering Earl, Rough’s grandfather with HED; the passionately loving and paradoxically angsty Paula, Rough’s mother; and the worrisome, adoring, creative Bonnie (Rough). Earl’s narrative consists mostly of fiction pieced together by stories Rough’s family tells her – Rough was too young to know any of these stories when Earl died – while Paula’s conflicting, fluctuating feelings of anger and love towards her “embarrassing” father flesh out the stress family members faced in response to the disorder. Bonnie, a witness to the familial struggle, and a carrier of the gene, deals with the conflict of bringing another life into this world with her husband, Dan. There’s a 25% chance they will have a son with HED, and a 25% change they will have a carrier daughter. Armed with the latest medical technology and procedures, Dan and Bonnie try to come to a conclusion about their future pregnancies: should they terminate the pregnancy for the sake of the child’s future suffering and continuing to pass on the disorder for future generations, or should they continue with the pregnancy because they do not want to insult the history of their family and Bonnie’s brother Luke (who has HED)?
With Earl and Paula’s narratives, the reader takes a step back in time and observes the familial struggles with everyday life and unique situations – financial hardships, drug abuse, hospital crises. Bonnie’s narrative becomes more personal, a search for an understanding of the situation, the medical options, and her own self. Her sections slowly turn into obsessive worry, complicating the dilemma more.
I think this was very well-written! Rough crafted a tough, sensitive situation and explained her decisions thoroughly, tying all the loose ends and answering every argument. It was comforting to read this piece without having “pro-life!” or “pro-choice!” shoved down my throat. She provides her thoughts, facts, and detailed descriptions of every step of her journey to the decision.
Rating: 
Goodreads: 3.91 of 5
Title: The Back in the Day Bakery Cookbook: Cakes, Pies, Cookies, Bars, and Breads from the Best Little Bakery in the South 
Author: Cheryl and Griffith Day
Genre: nonfiction, cooking
Publisher: Artisan
Publishing Date: March 6
Summary: Food Network star Paula Deen introduces the couple behind Savannah’s Back in the Day Bakery and their cookbook. Broken down by baked good, including “Cupcakes and Cakes,” “Pies,” “Cobblers, Crisps, and Tarts,” and “Cookies,” chapters feature Southern favorites such as baked eggs with grits and ham, and buttermilk chess pie, along with old-time favorites like lemon meringue pie, and strawberry-rhubarb crisp. The author’s “homespun style” permeates the collection—from font and borders to recipes—including the “Savories” chapter, featuring dishes such as roasted chicken and vegetable cobbler (touted as “A potluck favorite”) and vegetable potpie. Sidebars on topics from clever packaging for baked goods to ingredient information for items such as sorghum, as well as a resource pages, add value to this retro-style book that’s all about comfort food.
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Title: The White Pearl
Author: Kate Furnivall
Genre: historical fiction
Publisher: Berkley Trade
Publishing Date: March 6
Summary: “Malaya, 1941.” Connie Thornton plays her role as a dutiful wife and mother without complaint. She is among the fortunate after all-the British rubber plantation owners reaping the benefits of the colonial life. But Connie feels as though she is oppressed, crippled by boredom, sweltering heat, a loveless marriage. . . Then, in December, the Japanese invade. Connie and her family flee, sailing south on their yacht toward Singapore, where the British are certain to stand firm against the Japanese. En route, in the company of friends, they learn that Singapore is already under siege. Tensions mount, tempers flare, and the yacht’s inhabitants are driven by fear. Increasingly desperate and short of food, they are taken over by a pirate craft and its Malayan crew making their perilous way from island to island. When a fighter plane crashes into the sea, they rescue its Japanese pilot. For Connie, that’s when everything changes. In the suffocating confines of the boat with her life upended, Connie discovers a new kind of freedom and a new, dangerous, exhilarating love.
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Title: The Rescue of Belle and Sundance: One Town’s Incredible Race to Save Two Abandoned Horses
Author: Birgit Stutz, Lawrence Scanlan
Genre: nonfiction
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Publishing Date: March 6
Summary: In December 2008, snowmobilers spot two abandoned horses high in the Canadian Rockies. Starving and frostbitten, the horses have trampled the ten-foot-deep snow into a narrow white prison. Those who reach them bring hay but also a gun, in case the horses are too far gone. A glint of life in the horses’ eyes earns them the hay. The harrowing yet inspiring story of their near impossible rescue–involving the volunteer efforts of an entire village, first the excavation of a trench six feet deep and over 3280 feet long, and then a nearly 20 mile descent at negative 40 degrees–is sure to be read in one breathless sitting.
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Some books to look forward to in the future include:
Happy reading!
I’m going to play around with a new format this week.
Title: Pandemonium 
Author: Lauren Oliver
Genre: young adult – fantasy – dystopia
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publishing Date: February 28
Summary: The old Lena is dead. The old Lena remains with Alex in Portland, Maine, behind a wall of smoke and flame, but the new Lena was born in the Wilds, transformed by hardship, deprivation, and loss.
Now an active member of the resistance, Lena fights for a world in which love will no longer be considered a dangerous disease. Her inner life is as turbulent as the world around her. . . . Although consumed with grief for Alex, might she be falling in love with someone else?
The second in Oliver’s “Delirium” trilogy.
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Title: And Then It’s Spring
Author: Julie Fogliano
Genre: children’s
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Publishing Date: February 14
Summary: Following a snow-filled winter, a young boy and his dog decide that they’ve had enough of all that brown and resolve to plant a garden. They dig, they plant, they play, they wait . . . and wait . . . until at last, the brown becomes a more hopeful shade of brown, a sign that spring may finally be on its way. Julie Fogliano’s tender story of anticipation is brought to life by the distinctive illustrations Erin E. Stead, recipient of the 2011 Caldecott Medal.
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Title: The Dressmaker 
Author: Kate Alcott
Genre: historical fiction
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publishing Date: February 21
Summary: Tess, an aspiring seamstress, thinks she’s had an incredibly lucky break when she is hired by famous designer Lady Lucile Duff Gordon to be a personal maid on the Titanic’s doomed voyage. Once on board, Tess catches the eye of two men, one a roughly-hewn but kind sailor and the other an enigmatic Chicago millionaire. But on the fourth night, disaster strikes.
Amidst the chaos and desperate urging of two very different suitors, Tess is one of the last people allowed on a lifeboat. Tess’s sailor also manages to survive unharmed, witness to Lady Duff Gordon’s questionable actions during the tragedy. Others—including the gallant Midwestern tycoon—are not so lucky.
On dry land, rumors about the survivors begin to circulate, and Lady Duff Gordon quickly becomes the subject of media scorn and later, the hearings on the Titanic.
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Title: Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now – As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It
Author: Craig Taylor
Genre: nonfiction
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publishing Date: February 21
Summary: Five years in the making, and published on the eve of the 2012 Olympics, “Londoners” is a fresh and compulsively readable view of one of the world’s most fascinating cities–a vibrant, narrative portrait of contemporary London, featuring unforgettable stories told by the real people who make the city hum.
Apologies for the late post, normally I do this on Sundays. Been a rough few weeks with class.
Here’s the latest news on upcoming and newly published books!
Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult which will be released February 28th!
Summary: Edward Warren, twenty-four, has been living in Thailand for five years, a prodigal son who left his family after an irreparable fight with his father, Luke. But he gets a frantic phone call: His dad lies comatose, gravely injured in the same accident that has also injured his younger sister Cara.
With her father’s chances for recovery dwindling, Cara wants to wait for a miracle. But Edward wants to terminate life support and donate his father’s organs. Is he motivated by altruism, or revenge? And to what lengths will his sister go to stop him from making an irrevocable decision?
Lone Wolf explores the notion of family, and the love, protection and strength it’s meant to offer. But what if the hope that should sustain it, is the very thing that pulls it apart?
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At Left Brain, Turn Right by Anthony Meindl
Summary: 15 Weeks and 25 Ways to Unleash Your Inner Brando, Einstein, and Shakespeare:
The most successful and creative people in the world don’t possess anything different than you. They have no magic formula or special secret. They’ve simply prevented the left hemisphere of their brain – the “logical,” analytical side – from sabotaging their life. Whether you’re a ballerina or banker, accountant or actor, At Left Brain Turn Right shows you how to silence the noise of your left brain, ignite your creative side, and live the life you’ve always imagined. Using relatable no-nonsense stories from his own creative journey, Anthony Meindl guides you from the left brain to the right to realize your own full creative potential.
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The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice, out on Valentine’s Day!
Summary: A young reporter on assignment from the San Francisco Observer . . . An older woman welcoming him into her magnificent family home that he has been sent to write about and that she must sell with some urgency . . . A chance encounter between two unlikely people . . . An idyllic night—shattered by horrific unimaginable violence, the young man inexplicably attacked—bitten—by a beast he cannot see in the rural darkness . . . A violent episode that sets in motion a terrifying yet seductive transformation, as the young man, caught between ecstasy and horror, between embracing who he is evolving into and fearing what he will become, soon experiences the thrill of the wolf gift.
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And finally, a few books to look forward to later in 2012 and 2013:
Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje 
In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that “pendant off the ear of India, ” Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.
Another piece that I was required to read for my advanced nonfiction writing class. It was very different from the others (Maya Angelou and Geoffrey Wolff) in topic, writing style, and flow.
Running in the Family was difficult to read and dive into, at first. The writing style is disjointed and the timeline of the narrative jumbles and hops around. Within each section of chapters, the paragraph could begin with a story about the narrator’s grandmother, and end with paddies and riding on trains. However, after reading for a few hours and sinking into the rhythm of the text, I began to notice a pattern to the prose, poetry, dialogue, and photographs.
In order to me to understand this memoir, I pretended the narrator was a friend of mine, sharing a scrapbook of his family and telling stories about each photograph. Beautiful prose would describe the landscape of Sri Lanka, then memories of a family member and their adventures in Sri Lanka would spark, and from those stories a narrative about an adventure in England would branch. When I approached the memoir in this fashion, it was much easier to follow and discover the links from one family member to the next – and finally to the story of the narrator’s mother and father.
Another aspect of this memoir that is worth noting: while Wolff and Angelou repeatedly reminded the readers of their cultural background, their race, their history, Ondaatje’s identity was mixed. This colonial interpretation was so intricately woven that his own racial and cultural identity was vague. I understood that he was Dutch, but there were so many English, Canadian, and American ties within the Sri Lanka life that understanding Ondaatje’s identity and the identity of his family members became blurred. The jury’s still out figuring out if I liked that or not.
It was a good read, a bit difficult, but I do not think I’ll pick this book up again. And for that, I give it:
Rating: ★★ of 5
Goodreads: 3.88 of 5
Scribbles & Wanderlust 