by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Faithful Place, by Tana French
Viking, 2010
ISBN 978-0-143-11949-4

French’s gritty, working-class Dublin doesn’t seem all that far away from the mean streets of blue-collar Boston in Dennis LeHane’s mysteries. It is no surprise that French chose  LeHane's Mystic River as one of her top 10 favorite mysteries in an article for the Guardian. Similar to so many of LeHane’s stories, French’s tales are driven by dark, long-buried secrets of friends and family.

So far, French has published three novels, all interconnected through related characters, but not really a series. Each is haunting in its own way. In Faithful Place, a detective learns that although you can go home, it may be more like a visit to Hell than to a safe harbor.

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Breakdown, by Sara Paretsky
Putnam, 2012
ISBN 978-0-399-15783-7

V.I. Warshawski is the daughter of a Polish-American policeman and an Italian immigrant opera singer. She grew up tough on Chicago’s South Side, an area that the private investigator and lawyer hasn’t strayed far from as an adult and which always figures in the Warshawski stories. Breakdown is a fast-paced assault on tabloid journalism empires,  right-wing politics amid mucky electioneering.

As with a number of the books in this Library Mix series of mystery mini reviews, Paretsky’s novels are often driven by terrible, deeply hidden secrets. Always timely, Paretsky tracks American popular culture as well as politics. Breakdown touches on the current teenage passion for paranormal fiction. As the novel opens, a group of girls who are barely teenagers giggle as they film each other with cell phones in the dark of night. They are dancing around a tomb in an abandoned graveyard during a creepy hazing ritual. But they soon discover that the “vampire” they may have seen is more likely a murderer.

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

The Glass Castle: A Memoir, by Jeannette Walls, Scribner, 2005, ISBN0-7432-4753-1
Available at Powell's Books

Half Broke Horses: A True Life Novel, by Jeannette Walls, Scribner, 2009, ISBN 978-1-4165-8628-9
Available at Powell's Books

Jeanette Walls is the kind of author who makes it difficult to go to sleep at night. It’s hard to turn off the light and set aside the stories about her hardscrabble, far-from-everyday family.

First came The Glass Castle in 2005, a memoir about her impoverished childhood that demonstrates how parents can be dangerously negligent yet brilliantly nurturing at the same time.

Nomadic family life
Extreme resilience and inventiveness helped Walls and her siblings survive their college-educated parents’ nomadic lifestyle and erratic attempts to earn a living. Hunger, lack of indoor heating and running water, dirty clothing and homelessness were regular problems.

Walls has said it took her 20 years to work up the courage to share the story of her childhood, because she feared that friends and journalism colleagues would ostracize the girl who grew up with a garbage pit in her Appalachian backyard.

But The Glass Castle has been a runaway success with staying power on many bestseller lists, including a steady spot on USA Today’s Top-150 list since October 2009.

Readers told Walls that they were particularly fascinated and puzzled by her mother, Rose Mary Walls, who so wanted to be an artist that she wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning to go to work even if there was no food in the house.

Half Broke Horses
So Walls dug deeper into family memories, trying to write a book about her unconventional mother, with whom she has a loving, supportive relationship despite childhood difficulties. She struggled. So Rose Mary suggested writing instead about her mother, the raucous, resourceful westerner, Lily Casey Smith.

A rip-snorting ride of a memoir was born in 2009 and titled Half Broke Horses, A True Life Novel. The book isn't classified as non-fiction, because Walls told Lily’s story in first person and had to draw most of the information from family stories instead of interviews with her grandmother.

Lily died when the author was 8 years old. But in a Barnes and Noble interview, Walls says, “Lily was one of those people who, once you met her, she was seared on your brain…. Everything about Lily was loud: her voice, her clothes, her piano playing. She cussed like a sailor, danced so as to shake the rafters, and was always pulling out her gun or pulling out her false teeth.”

Southwestern adventures
Half Broke Horses begins with Lily’s youthful adventures in the Southwest, ranging from rescuing siblings during a flash flood to journeying through the desert alone on horseback for a month on the way to her first teaching job. It ends as she and her rancher husband ride out the Great Depression through creativity, severe frugality and a pre-dawn-to-dark schedule of hard work.

Along the way, Lily and Big Jim raise two rambunctious children who perfectly fit the old cowboy lyric of  “Don’t fence me in.”

By chance, I read Half Broke Horses before venturing into The Glass Castle. So Grandma Lily’s story informed my outlook on Walls’ scary yet exhilarating childhood. It also cast light on why, unlike Lily, Rose Mary — whose learning disabilities are apparent in Half Broke Horses — dealt poorly with the boundaries of work life as a teacher. It was a profession she was forced into by her pragmatic mother.

But Rosemary was a Bohemian from the get-go and nothing got in her way, especially once she met Rex Walls, an air force pilot, whose drinking and daring behavior covered up the secrets of his crippling, Appalachian childhood.

Surviving the Skedaddle
Extreme flexibility was necessary for the Walls family to survive what the bright but alcoholic Rex referred to as the “skedaddle” — abandoning one tiny town for another whenever bills or other problems piled up.

Despite deprivation, the Walls children experienced an abundance of rich experiences along the way.  When he was sober, Rex tutored them in geology, physics and inventiveness. Rose Mary taught them to view all difficulties as an “incredibly fun adventure.” She fed their imagination with piles of books from the public library. Sometimes the whole family would lounge around reading.

The Walls children inherited their parents’ ability to dream that they might someday earn a living doing something they enjoyed.

Except for the youngest, most fragile one, they also inherited the steel spine and practicality of Grandma Lily, memories of whom no doubt inspired them as teenagers when they ran like the dickens away from the poverty and mean circumstances of their childhood.

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Financial Lives of the Poets, by Jess Walter, Harper, 2009, ISBN 978-0-06-191604-5
Available at Powell's Books

Jess Walter's Financial Lives of the Poets is grim yet funny.

Business journalist Matthew Prior’s whole life is sliding into the red. His website, an inventive but expensive venture offering financial reporting through poetry—“think of it as money lit”—didn’t succeed.

Now Matthew is scrambling to avert loss of home, wheels and family as he hides looming bankruptcy from his increasingly distant wife.

New business plan
Meanwhile, the depressed financial poet digs the hole of his misery further by making what at first appears to be only a small bad choice—stepping out at midnight to buy exorbitantly priced milk at the local convenience store.

He needs it for his children’s cereal. What he doesn’t need is to get entangled with a group of “wasted, red-eyed, dry mouth high boys” who are shopping for munchies.

But Prior needs money quick, and the marijuana they share with him is so good that he decides to go into business briefly as a dealer. His “Idiot Financial Planner” becomes his first client.

Blank and blue verse
Prior turns his blank verse poetry toward the blank unknown of his future. In a chapter aptly named “Social Networking,” he contemplates the possibility that his wife, Lisa, is having an affair. She spends lots of time chatting online and texting on her cell phone.

“My wife types her life key-by-key/ site-by-site, primarily at night/ on the home PC where I try to find/ work while she’s drowsing, instead/ find the history of her browsing,/ surfing her lost past for evidence/ that she wasn’t always this sad.”

Along with despair and desperation, dark humor pervades Prior’s life: “When I finally go upstairs, Lisa’s in bed, just closing her phone. She’s wearing her giant, population-control pajamas, made of burlap, fiberglass insulation, razor wire.”

Funny and hopeful
It is this hard-edged funniness, Prior’s never-say-die hopefulness, and the likeability of even the seediest characters in author Jess Walter’s quirky novel that kept me reading.

After all, there is a lot to feel glum about in today’s economy, and a reader might prefer to forget troubles by getting lost in a mystery novel or a rip-roaring adventure.  But then one might miss out on Prior’s shaky, but blessed redemption as well as the novel’s unexpectedly sweet ending.

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Unafraid of the Dark, by Rosemary L. Bray, Anchor Books, 1999,
ISBN 0-385-49475-0
Available at Powell's Books

Sometimes you stumble over something important at the library, because you weren't looking for it to begin with. That is what happened when I read Unafraid of the Dark, A Memoir by Rosemary L. Bray, a former editor of the New York Times Book Review.

Bray's story illustrates the importance of public libraries in positively shaping lives and providing sanctuary for those who need respite from difficulties.

Extreme poverty and a violent, alcoholic father deviled Bray's childhood from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s.  Home was usually a place of fear for her, especially at night, when she would lie in the dark listening to her father berate and beat her mother.

Escaping home at the library
However, there were people and places that saved Bray. These included a clever, dedicated mother and the public library.

The author notes that she and her siblings would hurry up and work hard to complete household chores in order to escape home for a bit.

We all knew that when we finished doing what we had to do, we could cajole my mother into taking us to the library, with a trip to the playground afterward. The library was the part I was most interested in.

Once the house was clean, the next step in their library day ritual was for Bray's mother to make sure that all her children were clean and dressed in "decent clothes" for their walk through Hyde Park to Chicago's T.B. Blackstone Library.

But before they stepped out the door, Bray writes, Mama would  "go to the second drawer of the dresser that sat in our kitchen....In the drawer was the old black felt pocketbook....a repository for the really important records of our household." These included the family's library cards.

Libraries rescue us
It was the library that helped Bray to explore the rich worlds of fairytales, mythology, biology, and history. A lonely egghead of a child, she found her friends in fiction rather than on the playground.

This sad yet inspiring story about endurance and resilience is also a story about how libraries can help rescue us.

Reprinted from the Older Archives of Library Mix