by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Broken, A Mystery, by Karin Fossum, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010,
ISBN 0-547-52036-0


 A line of sad-looking people lingers in the driveway of an author’s house at all hours. “There are so many of them, they are hard to count,” she reflects while preparing for bed.

After midnight, the stairs creak. One of the strangers has entered her bedroom and her life uninvited. Similar to all the others in the queue, he isn’t real. He is an unnamed man who lives in the limbo of her imagination — an unformed character who demands that she create a story for him to inhabit.

Meek, mild, and murderous
So begins Karin Fossum’s Broken, an unusual and thought-provoking mystery. Although the author character remains unnamed throughout the novel, she gives her meek anti-hero a name, Alvar Eide, and a life as a quiet art gallery salesman who can’t say no and is forever changed by the demands of a drug- addicted acquaintance.

Although it is subtitled “A Mystery,” Fossum lets readers in on whodunit without subterfuge. There is no puzzling over clues; we know what happened and why. But the book presents other riddles. For me, Broken is ultimately about the mysteries of how a novel evolves, why the author creates it, and how the characters affect both novelist and readers.

As Eide’s story grows, so does concern for him. The sleeplessness of the nameless author telegraphs her worry. Readers may find themselves troubling over her stress as well as Eide’s emotionally sterile life that proves to be fertile ground for bad decisions.

Eide reminds me of a butterfly, which can never fly properly if it doesn’t have enough room to completely stretch out its wings upon emerging from its cocoon. His childhood has made it nearly impossible for him to form the family and friendships necessary to enjoy and navigate social interaction.

Characters who come to life
It is difficult not to believe in Eide’s existence; he seems so real. Some readers might even visualize themselves grabbing his shoulders and facing Eide for a heart-to-heart bit of advice. But it is a wasted fantasy. The fictional author who is creating him lets Eide be whom he is, someone who recoils from touch and involvement let alone bravery.

I was reminded of this transference of feelings — real-life worry for a fictitious person — long after I finished Broken, said goodbye to Eide and let him disappear into the queue of characters that may linger on or fall into potholes along the driveway of my memory.

But sometimes characters step out of line and remain with me, demanding my fascination and concern. It’s difficult to say goodbye to them. Such is the case not only with Eide but also with the mysterious, unnamed author who creates his story. I wonder whether she ever reappears in the queue of characters in Karin Fossum’s imagination requesting an opportunity to tell a new story. I would like to hear from her again.

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

Jump! Get Unstuck: Extraordinary Life Breakthroughs Through Innovative Change, by Robert S. Tipton, Alden-Swain Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-9825900-0-3
Available at Powell's Books

After being stuck for quite awhile trying to analyze my response to Robert S. Tipton’s thought-provoking self-help book Jump! Get Unstuck, I’ve decided to “take a step” as Tipton advises and just see where the writing process leads me.

Let the reader beware
Before getting started here, readers need to understand a few things about me: First, I am a great believer in Ben Franklin’s dictum that “God helps those who help themselves.” Franklin was a great example of the success of self-help since he had to drop out of school at age 10, but taught himself many subjects through reading.

Second, I don’t have a lot of experience on committees aimed at refreshing and restructuring organizations, an activity on which much of Jump is based.

Finally, while I’m okay with an occasional self-help magazine article, I don’t generally feel uplifted by self-help books.

As to my response to Jump, although some of the author's ideas resonate for me and the fictional story at its core is appealing,  I find the book's model for achieving positive change to be frustratingly vague.

The four disciplines aiding change
Nevertheless, Jump leapt from its publisher’s lily pad onto my review pile, and the colorful frogs on its cover have been calling for my attention ever since.

The author, Robert S. Tipton, describes himself as a consultant “who specializes in designing and facilitating innovative change.”

Jump is subtitled Extraordinary Life Breakthroughs Through Innovative Change. Most of us would love positive change in this financially confusing time. However, the book’s process for seeking change can be confusing, whether for organizations or individuals.

Tipton bases his process on four guiding “disciplines,” which he itemizes as  “quantum principles, ancient philosophy, spiritual practices, and sound leadership.”

Ancient philosophy
The part about ancient philosophy concerns being willing to learn from the past.

As Tipton says about himself, “I guess I was about 35 or so before I realized asking for help was a sign of strength and not an admission of weakness…. Then, some life-altering experiences showed me just how much I was missing by not actively seeking help, answers, insights, suggestions, input, and perspectives from others.”

Spiritual Practices
Tipton describes spiritual practices as being things we do to be “in harmony with nature, with other human beings—and with the universe as a whole.” Focusing solely on self-interest won’t create sustainable success.

Readers who are not Christians may feel a bit uncomfortable with his focus on that faith alone.

Quantum principles
Bouncing back to the most difficult idea--quantum principles—Tipton connects ideas from physics with social interaction. He says, “Our lives are driven by our choices in the same way the observer in quantum physics makes waves [of energy] collapse into particles.”

He implies that once individuals and organizations identify what they want to achieve, they can become more powerful and get to where they want to go by carefully altering and aligning small choices. The analogy he uses concerns a school of fish that all manage to shift direction together quickly.

Sound leadership
Finally, readers may end up feeling like Tipton is talking in circles about what sound leadership entails.

However, he hits the administrative pushpin on its head when he says not to “confuse leadership with the ability to be powerful over someone else.” Instead, he indicates that it is the ability to empower others to do the right thing.

Steps toward change
Tipton then details what he describes as an idealized four-step process moving from the first step of deciding “let’s change” (preparedness) to the final step of “make it real” (implementing the change).

Layers of Jump
Similar to a sandwich, Jump has three main layers. The top slice of bread contains all the ideas described above.

The middle, or meat of the book, is a 180-page fable about the rescue and positive transformation of a philanthropic organization.

The bottom slice contains flowcharts called “process maps” and diagrams based on nautilus-shaped Fibonacci spirals (also called "golden spirals") that are intended to illustrate change.

The process begins in a tightly coiled part of the spiral  labeled “let’s change” and swings out into a broad arc that ends at “make it real.”  Tipton likens the broadness of this arc to a person or group “sitting on a space rocket’s worth of positive energy” and blasting off at an ever-increasing speed toward the desired change.

Quick look at the fable
The fictional core of Jump is intended to illustrate the “Jump model for innovative change.”

The story concerns Franklin Falcon, a Horatio Alger-type figure whose business success and generosity led him to create a foundation to help poor, but promising students go to college.

As Falcon’s story opens, it becomes clear that the foundation may fail, because he has made some bad business decisions.

The heart of the tale involves Falcon’s staff learning to become a team again and refresh their mission of serving others. They do this during a blizzard that strands them at a crowded motel near their headquarters.

 Important strategies that arise include learning how to use social media—Facebook, My Space, Twitter, YouTube, other Internet websites, and email—to network and build support for their cause.

Like a ball of yarn, tossed hand to hand by millions, the news about the goodness of the Falcon Foundation and its woes “goes viral” spreading worldwide and building financial support.

Jump’s major drawbacks
Jump has three major drawbacks. The first one, already stated, is that although the book is highly detailed, its ideas for achieving change seem vague. It lacks the kind of straight-forward, how-to approach that individual readers may need to make its ideas usable.

The second problem is that it is a difficult book to read without the support of a group—preferably one led by a facilitator familiar with Tipton’s ideas. To some degree, this gets in the way of self-help.

While I agree with Tipton that it often takes a village to solve a problem, I like an “I get it” feeling when I am reading material that is supposed to help me make changes.

The third problem is that the core of the book would be far more helpful if it were based on a number of real-life examples of people and organizations that used Tipton’s process to improve themselves.

However, Tipton says, that was not possible.

“Some books of this kind use case studies, but I decided to use a fictional story because my clients tend to get miffed if I share the details of their specific situations! So I created a fictional situation based upon the work I do as a change coach.”

Nevertheless, it is difficult, based on allegory alone, to buy Tipton’s message of amazing growth simply by redefining purpose, networking,  using social media, and letting the spirituality flow.

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Cosmic, by Frank Cottrell
Walden Pond Press, 2008,
ISBN 0-061-83688-5
Available at Powell's Books

Sometimes a book sneaks up, taps the reader on the shoulder, and says “Aha!” One minute, you think that you are reading an outer space fantasy for kids; the next, you realize that it travels far beyond the universe of childhood.

As Father’s Day approached, I had no intention of writing anything about the holiday. The books I had found on that topic a year ago had been mostly sad and didn’t reflect the great dads I saw all around me.

But this week, I was, by chance, reading Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Cosmic, which its publisher has described as “ ‘Apollo 13’ meets ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.’”

Cosmic is an out-of-this-world romp for fathers to share with their children. It journeys through inner space as well as outer space as 12-year-old Liam reflects on all the fine “dadness” he has learned from his father.

Parenthood isn’t a typical concern for most 12-year-olds. However, Liam needs all the parenting wisdom he can recall since the maturity of his appearance has led him to commit what turns out to be a terrible blunder. Liam pretends to be the father of a 12-year-old friend so they can win an entertainment park contest.

As bad behavior goes, this is not so terrible. However, the entertainment park is in China far from their Liverpool suburb, and the thrill ride it promised is a trip into outer space.

In an interview with Walden Media, which plans to make Cosmic into a movie, Boyce acknowledges taking inspiration from Roald Dahl’s darkly humorous Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (better known as Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory). Similar to Dahl’s story, Cosmic involves dysfunctional parents pushing their children to win a contest.

Although far away, Liam's dad looms in his son's thoughts as a model of good fathering. Liam spends considerable time comparing his dad's behavior with that of the parents whose greed and thirst for fame is jet-propelling their children into an ill-advised trip with only one adult chaperone. Unfortunately, the children have selected as their chaperone the father who knows the least about science but who has won their vote with ice cream.

Although he is aware “that politeness is dadly and yelling is not,” Liam tries to avert takeoff by complaining loudly in a group meeting.

“How can we let our children go into space with a man who doesn’t even know that the moon has no innate luminescence? How can we let our children go into space at all?” he shouts. “Space isn’t safe. What kid of dad lets their child go into space?”

Boyce’s writing is spare, but the ideas are deep even if the language is simple. When Liam ends up being the dad who oversees the kid crew in space, he develops a strong sense of protectiveness for his shipmates.

In one moment of lovely prose, this new maturity causes Liam to stay awake while the others must snooze in sleeping bags attached to the wall.

“Hanging there, with their heads lolling, the children look like they’re sleeping in a row of Christmas stockings. And I’m the only one awake, like I’m Father Christmas or their guardian angel or something.”

Boyce was a successful screenwriter before becoming a children’s author. It was the director of the movie Millions who suggested that he turn his screenplay from that movie into a novel. The result was a 2004 Carnegie Medal for his first children’s book. Now Cosmic is on the shortlist for the 2009 Carnegie Medal, which will be announced this week.

Boyce works at home and has seven children, all of whom are home schooled. Good dad that he is, the author doesn’t complain about the clamor this creates during the workday. “Noise is creative!” he says.

Cosmic provides rich insights into many aspects of childhood from the lure of computer gaming to the loneliness of social awkwardness. Certainly, it is one of the most creative books I have read in recent months.

So blast off with the kids to your local library and pick up a copy of Cosmic for a joy ride you won't soon forget.

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Children of the Waters, by Carleen Brice, One World Books, Random House, 2009,
ISBN 0-345-49907-7
Available at Powell's Books

Who are we? This review is part of a continuing focus on the issues of identity—such as struggling to fit in, having a sense of place, and practicing tolerance.

Mixed roots
When Barack Obama began his campaign for the U.S. presidency, it increased the discussion about what it means to be born into more than one culture in America. Now the topic of multi-racial heritage is no longer a tributary in the national discussion; it has rushed into the mainstream of American thought.

An example of this change is the third annual Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival to be held June 12 to 13 in Los Angeles. It will feature writers, filmmakers, and performers who festival organizers say are “dedicated to sharing and nurturing storytelling of the Mixed experience.”

One of the authors scheduled in the festival is Colorado’s Carleen Brice, whose first novel, Orange Mint and Honey was transformed into the successful made-for-television movie “Sins of the Mother.” Her second novel, Children of the Waters concerns issues facing mixed-race families.

Brice specializes in stories that sizzle, sear, and then provide a healing ending.

Mixed marriage
In Children of the Waters, Brice focuses on two sisters—one white and the other biracial—who discover each other in adulthood. Their relationship starts out rocky, but ultimately leaves the reader feeling buoyant and hopeful for a better America.

Trish is a laid-back white woman in early middle age whose marriage to her black high school sweetheart has foundered. At the beginning of the story, she has returned home  with their son to Denver where none of the puzzling pieces of her life “seem to fit anymore.”

Priding herself on being racially color blind, Trish is blindsided when her son becomes the focus of racial profiling at the mall. The incident drives a wedge between mother and son.

This rift also makes Trish painfully aware of how alone she and her son are. The adults in her small extended family are long dead.

But Trish is accustomed to little comfort in her life, except for the dogs she brings home from her job as a vet tech. The grandparents who raised her were never particularly kind or demonstrative. And the adoring but drug addled mother, who abandoned her to their harsh care in early childhood, died in a car crash that also killed her only sibling. Or so Trish thinks.

Mixed adoption, mixed emotions
Trish’s soon-to-be-discovered sister, Billie, is an African-American earth mother who works hard at eating right and staying peaceful. A placid existence is the key to staying healthy and avoiding a flare-up of lupus, her dangerous chronic illness.

Billie is also concerned about the health of the planet and refuses to grow a lawn, because she deems it a poor ecological choice. She chooses instead to create a Zen-like yard of hard-packed swept dirt.

“She remembered hearing about how ancestors from West Africa had swept yards in Georgia, where the soil was clay, as it often is in Denver. Nothing appealed more to Billie than picking up a dying tradition of her ancestors.”

Almost nothing appeals less to Billie than ambition. She prefers teaching preschool to following in the footsteps of her financially successful parents and brother. Plus, her parents disapprove of her musician boyfriend, whose day job involves mowing lawns.

A flash flood of difficulties soon disturbs what Billie had viewed as the solid clay of her life. First, she accidentally becomes pregnant—a high-risk situation for someone with lupus— and discovers that her boyfriend is unsupportive. Then she meets Trish and learns what appeals to her least of all. Her parents never told her that she was adopted or that her birth mother was white.

Who are we?
Meanwhile, as Billie rejects Trish’s tentative reunion, Trish’s son begins to reject her as well. Then as Billie begins to grudgingly include Trish and Will in her life, Trish starts becoming uncertain about who she and her son are.

“With Will, [Trish] rarely thought of him as biracial. He was just her son. But around Billie, her white skin felt like a Klansman’s robe.”

Brice is the kind of author whose work is made for discussion. Children of the Waters makes one consider the true nature of race. Is it defined by the color of your skin or the culture in which you are raised? Brice causes us to think about who we are, what America is, and why we need our individual cultural heritage as much as we need our commonalities.

Similar to Matt de la Peña’s young adult novel Mexican Whiteboy, Brice’s book also makes us explore the dangers of hiding family history from children.

As part of Random House’s “Reader’s Circle” program, Children of the Waters contains an insightful interview with the author as well as a useful set of questions for classes and book clubs to consider. It is an ideal book for use in high school literature and social studies classes much the same as Mexican Whiteboy and the memoirs I’m Down by Mishna Wolff and Not a Genuine Black Man by Brian Copeland.

One of the great values of reading—whether fiction or nonfiction—is that it helps us to understand others and ourselves. One of the great values of public libraries is that they are good places to find all these books and to find ourselves.