Sula by Toni Morrison – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #48

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May 142012
 

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Sula
By Toni Morrison
Oprah Book Club® Selection #48, April 2002

Editorial Review:

In Sula, Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature, tells the story of two women–friends since childhood, separated in young adulthood, and reunited as grown women. Nel Wright grows up to become a wife and mother, happy to remain in her hometown of Medallion, Ohio. Sula Peace leaves Medallion to experience college, men, and life in the big city, an exceptional choice for a black woman to make in the late 1920s. Continue reading »

Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #47

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May 122012
 

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Fall On Your Knees
By Ann-Marie MacDonald
Oprah Book Club® Selection #47, January 2002

Editorial Review:

A sprawling saga about five generations of a family from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Fall on Your Knees is the impressive first fiction from Canadian playwright and actor Ann-Marie MacDonald. This epic tale of family history, family secrets, and music centers on four sisters and their relationships with each other and with their father. Set in the coal-mining communities of Nova Scotia in the early part of this century, the story also shifts to the battlefields of World War I and the jazz scene of New York City in the 1920s. Continue reading »

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #46

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May 112012
 

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A Fine Balance
By Rohinton Mistry
Oprah Book Club® Selection #46, November 2001

Book Description:

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers–a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village–will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. Continue reading »

The Corrections: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen – Oprah’s Book Club Selection # 45

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May 102012
 

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The Corrections: A Novel (Recent Picador Highlights)
By Jonathan Franzen
Oprah Book Club® Selection #45, September 2001

Editorial Review:

Jonathan Franzen’s exhilarating novel The Corrections tells a spellbinding story with sexy comic brio, and evokes a quirky family akin to Anne Tyler’s, only bitter. Franzen’s great at describing Christmas homecomings gone awry, cruise-ship follies, self-deluded academics, breast-obsessed screenwriters, stodgy old farts and edgy Tribeca bohemians equally at sea in their lives, and the mad, bad, dangerous worlds of the Internet boom and the fissioning post-Soviet East. Continue reading »

Cane River by Lalita Tademy – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #44

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May 092012
 

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Cane River
By Lalita Tademy
Oprah Book Club® Selection #44, June 2001

Editorial Review:

Lalita Tademy’s riveting family saga chronicles four generations of women born into slavery along the Cane River in Louisiana. It is also a tale about the blurring of racial boundaries: great-grandmother Elisabeth notices an unmistakable “bleaching of the line” as first her daughter Suzette, then her granddaughter Philomene, and finally her great-granddaughter Emily choose (or are forcibly persuaded) to bear the illegitimate offspring of the area’s white French planters. In many cases these children are loved by their fathers, and their paternity is widely acknowledged. However, neither state law nor local custom allows them to inherit wealth or property, a fact that gives Cane River much of its narrative drive.
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Icy sparks by Gwyn Hyman Rubio – Oprah Book Club Selection #42

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May 062012
 

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Icy Sparks
By Gwyn Hyman Rubio
Oprah Book Club® Selection #42, March 2001

Editorial Review:

The eponymous heroine of Gwyn Rubio’s Icy Sparks is only 10 years old the first time it happens. The sudden itching, the pressure squeezing her skull, and the “little invisible rubber bands” attached to her eyelids are all symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome. At this point, of course, Icy doesn’t yet have a name for these unsettling impulses. But whenever they become too much to resist, she runs down to her grandparents’ root cellar, and there she gives in, croaking, jerking, cursing, and popping her eyes. Nicknamed the “frog child” by her classmates, Icy soon becomes “a little girl who had to keep all of her compulsions inside.” Only a brief confinement at the Bluegrass State Hospital persuades her that there are actually children more “different” than she. Continue reading »

We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #41

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Apr 252012
 

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We Were the Mulvaneys
By Joyce Carol Oates
Oprah Book Club® Selection #41, January 2001

Editorial Review:

A happy family, the Mulvaneys. After decades of marriage, Mom and Dad are still in love–and the proud parents of a brood of youngsters that includes a star athlete, a class valedictorian, and a popular cheerleader. Home is an idyllic place called High Point Farm. And the bonds of attachment within this all-American clan do seem both deep and unconditional: “Mom paused again, drawing in her breath sharply, her eyes suffused with a special lustre, gazing upon her family one by one, with what crazy unbounded love she gazed upon us, and at such a moment my heart would contract as if this woman who was my mother had slipped her fingers inside my rib cage to contain it, as you might hold a wild, thrashing bird to comfort it.”
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House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #40

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Apr 252012
 

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House of Sand and Fog
By Andre Dubus III
Oprah Book Club® Selection #40, November 2000

Editorial Review:

Andre Dubus III wastes no time in capturing the dark side of the immigrant experience in America at the end of the 20th century. House of Sand and Fog opens with a highway crew composed of several nationalities picking up litter on a hot California summer day. Massoud Amir Behrani, a former colonel in the Iranian military under the Shah, reflects on his job-search efforts since arriving in the U.S. four years before: “I have spent hundreds of dollars copying my credentials; I have worn my French suits and my Italian shoes to hand-deliver my qualifications; I have waited and then called back after the correct waiting time; but there is nothing.” The father of two, Behrani has spent most of the money he brought with him from Iran on an apartment and furnishings that are too expensive, desperately trying to keep up appearances in order to enhance his daughter’s chances of making a good marriage. Now the daughter is married, and on impulse he sinks his remaining funds into a house he buys at auction, thus unwittingly putting himself and his family on a trajectory to disaster. The house, it seems, once belonged to Kathy Nicolo, a self-destructive alcoholic who wants it back. What starts out as a legal tussle soon escalates into a personal confrontation–with dire results. Continue reading »

Drowning Ruth: A Novel, by Christina Schwarz – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #39

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Apr 242012
 

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Drowning Ruth: A Novel
By Christina Schwarz
Oprah Book Club® Selection #39, September 2000

Editorial Review:

For 19th-century novelists–from Jane Austen to George Eliot, Flaubert to Henry James–social constraint gave a delicious tension to their plots. Yet now our relaxed morals and social mobility have rendered many of the classics untenable. Why shouldn’t Maisie know what she knows? It will all come out in family therapy anyway. The vogue for historical novels depends in part on our pleasure in reentering a world of subtle cues and repressed emotion, a time in which a young woman could destroy her life by saying yes to the wrong man. After all, there was no reliable birth control, no divorce, no chance of an independent life or a scandal-free separation. Continue reading »

Open House by Elizabeth Berg – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #38

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Apr 222012
 

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Open House: A Novel
By Elizabeth Berg
Oprah Book Club® Selection #38, August 2000

Editorial Review:

The narrator of Elizabeth Berg’s Open House calls divorce “a series of internal earthquakes … one after the other.” She ought to know. Samantha is abandoned by her husband in the opening pages of this three-handkerchief special, and the resultant tremors keep her off-balance for most of the novel. There are practical problems aplenty, of course, including a shortage of money and an 11-year-old son to raise. But Sam’s sense of emotional bereavement is far worse, despite the fact that her husband had been giving her the conjugal cold shoulder for years: Continue reading »

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