Joy's Suggestions for our June Book

Immortal Bird By Doron Weber

From Booklist

When Weber’s eldest son, Damon, is born with a heart defect, he devotes every waking hour to helping his boy lead a normal life. But Damon’s complex condition requires surgeries from his earliest months, and as a consequence, he develops a severe protein deficiency that is often fatal. Weber and his wife consult experts from the nation’s top medical centers, including the Mayo Clinic and New York’s prestigious Columbia Presbyterian Hospital (Weber is both impressed by the latter’s sophisticated medical technology and appalled by its often inept care). Meanwhile, affable Damon displays remarkable courage in the face of his deteriorating health, excelling in school and proving himself to be a talented young actor. He even lands a minor speaking role on the critically acclaimed HBO series Deadwood. For 16 years, Damon endures good days and bad, but when he becomes gravely ill, it’s clear a heart transplant is the only option. Sadly, its success is short-lived. Both heartbreaking and life affirming, this is a tender tale of the love between a father and son. --Allison Block

A Spool of Blue Thread By Anne Tyler (358 pages)

It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon. . .” This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture. Abby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets. From Red’s father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red’s grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, here are four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their anchor.

Brimming with all the insight, humor, and generosity of spirit that are the hallmarks of Anne Tyler’s work, A Spool of Blue Thread tells a poignant yet unsentimental story in praise of family in all its emotional complexity. It is a novel to cherish.

All the Light We Cannot See By Anthony Doerr (545 pages)

From Booklist

*Starred Review* A novel to live in, learn from, and feel bereft over when the last page is turned, Doerr’s magnificently drawn story seems at once spacious and tightly composed. It rests, historically, during the occupation of France during WWII, but brief chapters told in alternating voices give the overall—and long— narrative a swift movement through time and events. We have two main characters, each one on opposite sides in the conflagration that is destroying Europe. Marie-Louise is a sightless girl who lived with her father in Paris before the occupation; he was a master locksmith for the Museum of Natural History. When German forces necessitate abandonment of the city, Marie-Louise’s father, taking with him the museum’s greatest treasure, removes himself and his daughter and eventually arrives at his uncle’s house in the coastal city of Saint-Malo. Young German soldier Werner is sent to Saint-Malo to track Resistance activity there, and eventually, and inevitably, Marie-Louise’s and Werner’s paths cross. It is through their individual and intertwined tales that Doerr masterfully and knowledgeably re-creates the deprived civilian conditions of war-torn France and the strictly controlled lives of the military occupiers.