1. Falling Leaves by Adeline Yen Mah – Autobiography – 278 Pages (1997)
Born in 1937 to an affluent Chinese family but emotionally abused by Eurasian stepmother. Adeline moved from Hong Kong to England and eventually to the U.S. to become a physician and writer. A moving story of a girl’s journey into adulthood. Explores the harsh realities of growing up female in a family and society that kept girls in emotional chains. Potent psychological drama pitting a stubborn little girl against the most merciless of adversaries and rivals: her own family.
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2. The Color of Water by James McBride (A Black Man’s Tribute to his White Mother) – Autobiography – 278 Pages (1996)
James mother was a rabbi’s daughter, born in Poland and raised in the south. She fled to Harlem and married a black man, founded a Baptist church and put twelve children through college. There are two stories, son’s and mother’s beautifully juxtaposed. Told with humor.
(Personal note: I love his writing. The book starts “When I was 14 my mother took up 2 hobbies: riding a bicycle and playing the piano. The piano I didn’t mind but the bicycle drove me crazy.”).
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3. One Amazing Thing by Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni – Fiction - 220 Pages
Late afternoon in an Indian visa office in an unnamed American city. Most customers have come and gone, but nine people remain. A punky teenager with an unexpected gift. An upper class Caucasian couple whose relationship is disintegrating. A young Muslim-American man struggling with the fallout of 9/11. A graduate student haunted by a question about love. An African-American ex-soldier searching for redemption. A Chinese grandmother with a secret past. And two visa office workers on the verge of an adulterous affair.
When an earthquake rips through the afternoon lull, trapping these nine wildly individual characters together, their focus first jolts to a collective struggle to survive. There’s little food. The office begins to flood. Then, at a moment when the psychological and emotional stress seems nearly too much for them to bear, the young graduate student suggests that each tell a personal tale, “one amazing thing” from their lives, which they have never told anyone before. As their surprising stories of romance, marriage, family, political upheaval, and self-discovery unfold against the urgency of their life-or-death circumstances, the novel proves the transcendent power of stories and the meaningfulness of human expression itself. One Amazing Thing is a passionate creation about survival—and about the reasons to survive.
From Ha Jin, author of Waiting, winner of the National Book Award: “Ingeniously conceived and intelligently written, this novel is a fable for our time. The characters, troubled or shattered by their past, vibrate with life when they begin to speak. The book is a fun read from the first page to last.”
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4. The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr (1995) – Autobiography – 320 Pages
Mary Karr’s memoir, is riveting first of all as narrative, a meandering river of humorous, harrowing, poignant and deeply interesting stories. It is poetic as well, its images evoking a gritty physical reality sharply flavored by the locutions of the author’s origins. Full of casual violence, dislocation, fragmentation, it is social and psychological drama with a strikingly American slant.
In Leechfield, Texas, on the Gulf Coast, Charlie Marie Moore met J. P. Karr, a working man employed by Gulf Oil, and, for reasons which remained mysterious to Mary Karr, abandoned her husband and married him. Leechfield—swampy, vermin-infested, fouled by chemical poisons produced one of the highest cancer rates in the world, once voted by BUSINESS WEEK as “one of the ten ugliest towns on the planet.” Into this volatile family the author was born.
The Liars’ Club was a group of men, including Karr’s father, which met to drink, play pool, and tell stories. In this masculine world the author found some relief from the traumas of life at home dominated by a mother so mentally unstable that at one point she was committed to a mental institution. The author lived on the raw edge. Yet her spirit was never broken, and the deep feelings she retained for her mother led her, when she was in her twenties, to probe for a truth which set them both free.
THE LIARS’ CLUB is moving, deeply enjoyable, and a brilliant testimonial to the value of art. ___________________________________________
5. Little Bird of Heaven – Joyce Carol Oates (2009) – Fiction - 442 Pages
In the tradition of the remarkably successful "New York Times" bestseller "The Gravedigger's Daughter," Oates is back with this dark, romantic, and captivating tale set in the Great Lakes regions of upstate NY.
With "Little Bird of Heaven," Joyce Carol Oates returns again to depictions of life in Sparta, N.Y., "the doomed city on the Black River." In this latest offering, the fading blue-collar burg has been rocked by the grisly murder of one Zoe Kruller, a troubled but charismatic country singer with a taste for seedy pleasures.
This is a powerful novel. Oates's feel for the rhythms of hardscrabble life and its sour mix of alcoholism, suicide, drug abuse, adultery and murder is as keen as ever. In Sparta she has created a fictional universe to stand beside Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County or Cheever's Shady Hill. Her descriptions of the geography of urban decay -- the rusted bridges, tangled back alleys and trash-strewn lots -- are as vivid as any naturalist's portrayal of more felicitous scenes. Her unsentimental language makes a high-lonesome kind of poetry out of otherwise sordid and unremarkable circumstance.
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