The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken
A London Travelouge That Shows the Road Back from Grief and Loss
A writer travels to London to mourn/discover/bury her mother, dead now for 10 months. The author claims, with great frequency, that it’s not a memoir, no matter how much it seems like one. The lady doth protesteth…
The unnamed narrator is a modified version of the actual author, McCracken tells us in a fourth wall breaking aside to the reader. I read the book cold, with no previous knowledge of the author’s work or life, and was willing to believe her, but really hoping that this secondary narrator, the actual author popping up from time to time, was an unreliable narrator…and that she’d made it all up whole cloth because if she had, it’s pretty amazing worldbuilding. You’re on your own for finding the answer to that.
The protagonist, who may or may not be the hero of the book, if indeed such a thing even exists, is a writer in her late 50s whose mother has died almost a year before and has been taking care of all the details involved. What she isn’t is ready to close the lid on her mother’s life, and she’s gone to London, where they went together three years earlier, and wanders around the town, rabbit holes of recollection looming like open manhole covers on the streets they’d trod together.
It’s not a memoir, she asserts. No, it’s an exercise in self-indulgence and grieving. I say that like it’s a bad thing, but it’s not. The fictional author is out there processing grief in a melancholy travelogue of a city they shared as she looks for the mother of her memory in museums and theaters, both of which her mother had loved until at last she can accept that its time to open the collection of photos the realtor has sent her, showing a house far too neat, far too empty, and accept that her mother is gone.
Anyone who’s dealt with the decline of an aging relative will find this resonant, and as to whether it’s fact or fiction, as an instructor in a writing class tells the protagonist in the book, said, “If I know one thing, it’s that it doesn’t make any difference. Call it what you want.”
Living Memory by David Walton
Mav and Buzz – Two Heroes With Dfferent Paths
You know the square jaw, the steady gaze, the proud bearing. He stands alone, confident that he’s the best of the best, ready to do the job singlehanded because anyone else would slow him down. He’s a hero; heroes never quit, never fail, and never need a hand.
Tom Cruise’s Maverick and Disney’s Buzz Lightyear are cut from the same cloth, but the fictional fabric that makes up their movies is as different as night and day. Continue reading
All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay
All the Seas of the World
by Guy Gavriel Kay
Netgalley / GoodReads / Amazon
Returning triumphantly to the brilliantly evoked near-Renaissance world of A Brightness Long Ago and Children of Earth and Sky, international bestselling author Guy Gavriel Kay deploys his signature ‘quarter turn to the fantastic’ to tell a story of vengeance, power, and love.
On a dark night along a lonely stretch of coast a small ship sends two people ashore. Their purpose is assassination. They have been hired by two of the most dangerous men alive to alter the balance of power in the world. If they succeed, the consequences will affect the destinies of empires, and lives both great and small.
One of those arriving at that beach is a woman abducted by corsairs as a child and sold into years of servitude. Having escaped, she is trying to chart her own course—and is bent upon revenge. Another is a seafaring merchant who still remembers being exiled as a child with his family from their home, for their faith, a moment that never leaves him. In what follows, through a story both intimate and epic, unforgettable characters are immersed in the fierce and deadly struggles that define their time.
All the Seas of the World is a page-turning drama that also offers moving reflections on memory, fate, and the random events that can shape our lives—in the past, and today.