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Deb Baker has commented on (4) products.

Arcadia by Lauren Groff

Deb Baker, January 2, 2013

I wrote about my response to this book at my blog, bookconscious. As a reader I loved it and want to read everything Groff has ever written. As a writer, I felt completely humbled by her skill. It's not just that the story is fascinating and the themes of the book both effective and subtle. Bit is one of the most interesting and original main characters I've come across in a long time.

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The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

Deb Baker, January 3, 2012

Review from my blog, bookconscious, which you can find at wordpress.com

I’m a fan of magical realism, perhaps because as a Spanish and English double major, I took a contemporary Latin American literature class in college and got a taste of some of the early masters of this literary technique (In Spanish! I marvel at that now). I especially enjoy elements of magical realism that blend with political and social history. I would like to make a bold statement here and say that The Tiger’s Wife is among the best examples of this kind of writing I have ever read.

Set in a Balkan country after the war of the 1990′s, the story is told by a young doctor, Natalia. Through Natalia’s recollections, readers learn about her beloved grandfather, himself a doctor, who has recently died alone in a town now part of a different country. Through the stories he told her as a child and the things she learns as she searches for clues to his solitary death and possible last encounter with a mysterious man who seems immortal, Natalia pieces together a story from her grandfather’s boyhood, one he never told her.

There’s no way I can do justice to this phenomenal novel in a few sentences. The writing is excellent: vivid, but clean, and as my grandmother would say, there’s not one thing that doesn’t belong. The story is incredible; full of cultural and historical detail, fully imagined, and as I said before, complex and nuanced.

By the end of the novel you feel as if you’ve finished a complicated puzzle, or solved a hard cross-word, or stitched the pieces of a pattern perfectly so that not a thread is out of place, and the seams match exactly as they should. Everything falls into place, but artfully, subtly; there are no clanking gears (one critique of Simon’s book is that her book’s pieces fit together rather noisily).

The Tiger’s Wife is about human experience. It’s about love, about family and war and inhumanity and suffering and finally, hope. It’s a book about memory and myth and their intersection, time and mortality and healing. But it’s also a good yarn; a story (several interwoven stories, really) you could read aloud by the fireside, if you were so inclined. I suspect anyone listening would beg you to go on a little longer.

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22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson

Deb Baker, September 1, 2011

Hodgkinson's skillful use of different points of view enhances the telling of this story about a Polish couple separated during WWII and reunited in England after, along with their son. Janusz and Silvana are trying to put together the pieces of their lives and live normally, but there is much that they each kept hidden in wartime that is hard to reveal or admit in peacetime, even to themselves. Left to guess about each other's experiences they make a mess of things, and then try to undo the tangle and put the family back together again -- although I won't give away how it ends, I will say it's a pleasantly ambiguous denouement which would offer book clubs plenty to discuss. Hodkinson presents their story with gorgeous, cinematic scenes and vivid details that will keep you glued to the page. Aurek, the boy who has only known war and hiding, will break your heart. A searing, beautiful book about the aftermath of war, the resilience of the human spirit, and the ability to love and trust when everything one has known has been destroyed.

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The Death of the Adversary by Hans Keilson

Deb Baker, January 1, 2011

A moving, fascinating read. Some parts are darkly humorous, others are tender to the point of being heartbreaking. When the novel ended, (an ending so beautiful and sad I thought about it for days), I felt the same aching emptiness I feel after a good cry. As for the scene where Keilson portrays a young German telling friends about participating in the desecration of a Jewish cemetery: I don’t think I’ve come across a more vivid, evocative, soul-searing description of the senselessness of violence in any novel. You understand as you read this passage how it might be that ordinary people are swept up in the brutality of war, and what it might feel like know that your community is the target of such blind, ugly rage.

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