Deep Down True by Juliette Fay

This week we’re featuring some of our favorite Audio Books, just in time for planning your summer road trips. You can also click the Audio Books tag at the bottom of this post or at the top of the tag cloud on the right hand side of our blog’s home page for more great audio book suggestions!

I actually listened to this book as a downloadable audio book, and I was afraid that the narration, which I didn’t like initially, was going to keep me from enjoying it. But, as it turned out, the narrator positively influenced my perception of the protagonist. I ended up loving it, and I think those of you who like good women’s literature will also fall in love with it. Juliette Fay is also the author of Shelter Me.

Dana, a recently divorced mom, job-challenged, with a wayward and slightly goth niece having shown up on her doorstep, struggles to figure out who she’s going to be now and how to be true to herself when everyone else needs a piece of her. She’s uncertain of what she wants, and at the same time, afraid of finding out what that is. It’s my favorite kind of book that can make me feel like I’m right there, feeling everything the main character feeling. I think I especially liked that she was a bit afraid, like she was never sure she was doing the right thing. Ultimately you have to be true to who you are beyond the surface, and if you are, whatever you do is the right thing.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

Shop till You Drop by Elaine Viets

Helen Hawthorne is a woman with a secret!  She is on the run from a court order to pay alimony to her cheating ex-husband, Rob.  Helen, a PR person in a respectable St. Louis company, has been the bread winner for several years while Rob stayed home.  All that changed when she came home early from work and caught Rob kissing the neighbor.  When the divorce judge ordered her to pay alimony, Helen fled St. Louis, refusing to pay money to her cheating ex-husband.  She ends up in Fort Lauderdale, FL trying to stay off the radar of law enforcement.

In order to do so she needs to take jobs that pay “under the table.”  She discovers Juliana’s, an exclusive boutique, where women must be buzzed in beyond the green door.  The women who frequent Juliana’s are trophy wives or mistresses to older rich gentlemen. Their lives are very different from Helen’s. They get the latest cosmetic procedures and spend more money than Helen earns in a week on a purse.

Things change for Helen when her customers began to turn up murdered. Helen fears the women murdered might be a result of something fishy going on inside Juliana’s. These fears escalate when someone is found murdered inside Juliana’s itself. Can Helen manage to keep a low key profile while a murder investigation is going on around her? Will the publicity allow Rob to find her?  Shop Till You Drop is the first in the series with the 11th book in the series being released May 1st. Elaine Viets writes books that are the perfect read for a long beach weekend.

Find and request this book in our catalog.

The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter

Even when the staunchest romantics are told how a particular book contains the perfect ruminations on love, life, and happiness it can surely produce that groan-inducing, finger-down-the-throat heaving effect. Well, The Feast of Love is a book that is strongly based on these themes, but I assure you, it will not make you sick by any means. Here you will find a book that encompasses all the elements that delight the romantics, engage the literary readers, or captivate those who simply want a good read. Charles Baxter’s, The Feast of Love, is perhaps the essential choice for bridging the ever-widening gaps between genres. It is uniquely lyrical, tender and sweet without being saccharine, sad without being overtly depressing, and it perfectly captures all the complexities of love and relationships in a way that’s relatable for all.

The story takes place in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Charles Baxter, in a bold move that seldom works in fiction, injects himself into the novel’s opening passage. He wakes in the middle of the night and decides that a late night stroll would be the best thing for his insomnia. He comes across his neighbor Bradley, who is out walking his dog, (the dog, though a minor presence in the story, serves as a humorous foil for Bradley, even sharing his name). Charles tells his neighbor that he is attempting to write a new novel, but is not having much luck. Bradley suggests that Charles call his novel, The Feast of Love. He then proposes that Charles meet several people so he can learn from their stories and use them for his book. These people become the living embodiment of The Feast of Love, all of them coming from drastically different walks of life with their own chapters devoted to their unique experiences.

Each character shares their confusion, pain, and wisdom. We meet Bradley’s former wives and learn of their new found loves. We are introduced to Oscar and Chloe, a young couple whose wild, and occasionally reckless, passion for one another is limitless and free. We also meet a retired professor, Harry Ginsberg, who is reeling from the sadness of not knowing the whereabouts of his clinically insane son. Everyone’s story contains equal parts sorrow and enchantment, leaving us with a sense of delight, dismay, and inevitable growth. As Bradley says, “Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there’s always that day. That day is always in your possession. That’s the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day.”

You can find this book in our library catalog here.

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli

It seems to me that blogging and hubris go hand-in-hand, so maybe now it’s time for a little braggadocio.   Not mine, though.  Asterios Polyp’s.

Asterios Polyp is the protagonist of David Mazzucchelli’s graphic novel by the same name.  He (Polyp) is a child of immigrants, their surname halved by an impatient administrator—fans of Homer will likely guess the omitted part by the end.  He’s also a quick-study genius, an expert in and esteemed professor of architecture (despite never having built a single structure), and an all-around pompous jerk.  When we meet him he is broke, newly divorced, and his house is burning down (despair, lightning), so he runs to the appropriately named town of Apogee, where he becomes a car mechanic.

Except that’s not really what the book is about—that’s how it starts, though.  The rest of this novel is hard to explain without Mazzucchelli’s illustrations, which is perhaps why I think that this comic is so brilliant: you truly have to see it to completely understand the story.  Even the colors are significant, though it isn’t necessary to be a student of printmaking to grasp the author/artist’s intentions.  For example: in a flashback, Polyp is shown meeting his future wife.  He’s depicted entirely in cyan, while the color used for her is magenta.  Their “blending” happens literally when, as they have a conversation over the course of a few panels, they both are gradually rendered in purple ink.  Over time as their marriage crumbles—largely because Polyp is incapable of understanding the world in anything other than black-and-white, true-or-false terms—the two-color cyan/magenta dichotomy returns.

It’s simple, beautiful, perfectly suited to the medium, and sort of amazing that this is relatively new territory for so-called Graphic Novels.   Some artists, like Chris Ware, are more adventurous with their graphic storytelling techniques, but by-and-large I’d guess that comic book fans are used to authors drawing/telling a linear story: the action unfolds from left to right, panel by panel—all easily translated to a movie screen, I might add.   Mazzucchelli, however, moves far beyond this, and will utilize something like the “one page” comic (see Frank King’s Gasoline Alley) as a means to simultaneously depict his characters’ wildly different perspectives while they engage in a conversation about postmodern musical composition; that he does this without alienating his reader (in fact, you might not even notice this at first) is what makes this book so brilliant.

Whether you like comics, art, or just skillful and innovative storytelling, you must read this.