I love a good mystery, and Louise Penny’s A Touch of the Light has everything I look for in a good mystery. (1) Wonderful writing. (2) Characters, both major and minor, who have depth, quirks, and their own element of mystery. For example, a recurring character in these books, Ruth, who is “an embittered old poet,” is superbly drawn, unlike any other character I’ve encountered. (3) A complex puzzle and surprising denouement. In this case, the question of whether the murder victim, Lillian Dyson, could have changed from being a very bad person to being a good person is central to solving the case. (4) Interesting issues that crop up as an integral part of the investigation, like the question of whether a person can truly change, and also in this book, what distinguishes the art of genius from the art of the predictable. (5) And did I mention excellent writing? I have not yet read all of Penny’s Inspector Gamache books where bad things happen in Three Pines, a community too small to be on any maps, crimes that keep drawing Gamache out of Montreal to investigate. He solves the crimes but the ensuing intrigues of the human heart and mind are not so easily tied up. I will be reading all of these books and eagerly anticipating the next new one from Penny.

I wanted to read this book because the real-life Flannery O’Connor is a main character. And, yes, her character alone grabbed my attention when I started reading, but the more I read the more I could not put the book down. We are privy to the internal lives of no less than eight main characters and they are all compelling. The writing style is quiet, unassuming, compassionate, giving voice to the turmoil and clashes of opposites in the heart of each character—intense joy and heartbreaking tragedy, passion and indifference, selfishness and generosity, engagement and withdrawal, attraction and rejection. This book is luminous with sadness and insight. The author writes on her Web site that she worked on the book for seven years because she wanted it to be worthy of O’Connor, whom she admires not only as a great writer but as a person who lived a “well-lived life,” a concept that is a major theme of this book. I feel that she has done O’Connor proud. I’m inspired to re-read Flannery O’Conner and to get my hands on Ann Napolitano’s first book, Within Arm’s Reach, right away.

Laura Lippman’s The Girl in the Green Raincoat is great fun…and it’s short! This is another in the Tess Monaghan series, a couple of which I’ve read and enjoyed. The book’s main antecedent is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window—Tess is laid up, forbidden to move because of complications with her pregnancy (love it—I don’t know of another tough female PI in this genre who gets pregnant). Looking out her window, a la Jimmy Stewart, she watches a girl in a green raincoat walking her dog, who is wearing a matching green coat, in the park across the street. Then one day Tess sees the dog alone running as if pursued, with the leash dragging behind. Well, what has happened to the girl in the green raincoat? Tess suspects foul play and uses all her resources, minus her mobility, to investigate. The surprising and satisfying resolution puts Tess in danger of losing her life. I especially liked this book in the Tess series. Maybe partly because Tess is “imprisoned,” the story is as much about people, families, and relationships as about action, plot, and “whodunit.” I also like Lippman’s characters who are, as Tess puts it, people “the world tended to underestimate.”

I liked this quiet well written book. But whether I had liked this book or not, I could not NOT have read it. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are in the top few of my list of treasured books! The “Miss Bronte” of this title is Charlotte. The “Romancing” of the title is ironic, for though Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre--that great romance of all time--her passionate, romantic spirit suffered from the failure of romance in her most of her real life, according to this fictionalized story based on known facts. In her life, she was wooed by two extraordinary men, but only for their own selfish purposes, for the sheer egotism of one, and for material gain and fame gained by association with her of the other. She fell for the first with all her heart and soul and had high hopes of the second, but neither “gentlemen” had any intention of consummating a love affair with her. She was left broken-hearted and suffered the greater heartbreak of losing her beloved sisters and brother who died young one by one. As she grew older, she was wholeheartedly and passionately romanced by a very ordinary man who left her heart unmoved. Did she die of a broken heart at the end? Did she remain unloved? Were her passions doomed never to be consummated? This author poses some interesting answers taking very plausible small liberties with known facts.

I could not put this book down. This is a riveting story of how a broken family living in the Columbus, Ohio, area (where I live, too) try to survive an avian flu epidemic that more than decimates the population worldwide. Could this book be more timely with the current threat of H1N1 in all of our minds?

Ann and Peter and their two daughters are beautifully drawn as earnest but humanly flawed people who are faced with not only the threat of the deadly virus, but also with the failure of the systems that sustain them because of the deaths of so many people--no electricity, no phone, no transportation to get food on market shelves or into homes. And the family must face the breakdown of the community into a dangerous, fragmented, rule-less, everyone-for-him/herself environment. The family's decisions and coping actions are often heartbreaking. There is a thread that is tied up at the end of the book that seemed unnecessary, since the issue did not seem clear in the flow of the story. But that aside, I loved this book and can't wait for more from Carla Buckley.

In the late 1700s, Daniel Rooke, a naive astronomer/scientist with his head and heart set squarely on the stars in the sky, sails as a lieutenant with the first fleet taking English prisoners to colonize New South Wales. Two things happen. A single terrible incident foreshadows for Rooke the brutal impact of a colonizing force on the native people. And Rooke's heart opens to an astonishing native girl who teaches him how deeply the heart can feel. The inevitable choices he must make change his life forever.

If you love this book as much as I did, you will also love the books of Andrea Barrett.

The Air Between Us takes place in Revere, Mississippi in 1966, a town on the brink of desegregation. The looming prospect of a future with no boundaries between races helps reveal complex and often hidden relationships, and surprising secrets, among the townspeople across races and across classes. I would recommend this book for the story. But the characters did not engage me, and the whole book is written in a folksy colloquial Southern voice, which is OK coming from the characters but annoying coming from the third person narrator.

I liked the structure of this book--alternating between (1) a present day murder trial with Aslaug, the main character, as the defendant, and (2) the unfolding story of what really happened leading up to the trial. And I liked the plantlore in the first part of the book when Aslaug and her mother gather and subsist on plants and herbs alone. We learn a lot about the properties of wild plants. Truly fascinating. But ultimately I didn't care about any of the characters. Their actions and dialogue are stiff and opaque. They are like game pieces being moved around a very rich and intriguing gameboard. I hope the writer can bring her characters to life in her next book.

I highly recommend Peony in Love. I love the way Lisa See can portray a long-ago Chinese culture that is firmly grounded in historical fact but brought to vivid life by a compelling story and such engaging characters. I loved this about Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and was happy to find it in Peony in Love, too. Peony in Love is a fascinating story of a time in China when women wrote and published poetry and other literature in spite of a culture that over most of its history treated women as property with no rights or autonomy.

This book will stay with me for a long time. It's beautifully written and emotionally powerful. Set in a remote and mystically beautiful landscape removed from the immediate physical horrors of war, Sheers reveals the inevitable human pain, loss, and moral lose/lose dilemmas that descend even on the most isolated people.

This alternative history story is based on the author's fascination with what he learned from a real-life participant in the British resistance organization about the secret plans for fighting against a German invasion. The story takes place from Fall of 1944, when Germany has invaded the south of England, to mid-1945, when London and most of the country have been overtaken, though there is no official British surrender.

Six women living on the only farms in a remote valley in Wales are suffering from the desertion of their men who have all secretly and silently disappeared in the night to participate, the women decide, in the British resistance organization planned in 1940. When six German Wehrmacht soldiers on a mysterious mission arrive and take up residence in the valley, a tense, anxious dance begins between the soldiers and the women, who draw together and shrink apart, until the reality of the war invades the valley and shatters the uneasy dance in surprising and heartbreaking ways.

The landscape of this human drama is echoed in the universal, elemental balance between the land and the people it sustains. Owen Sheers' poet's eye gives a striking view of this landscape. For a small example, who can resist this word picture describing two of the characters walking together "... disturb[ing] skylarks from their nests and ... watch[ing] as the startled birds ascended above them, disappearing up the threads of their song."

For me, this book matches the power and depth of Pat Barker's World War I trilogy--Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road--though it's very different.

I don't know if magical surrealism is a genre but that's what I would call Kafka on the Shore. It is surreal in that things happen in parallel worlds and dream worlds that are just as real or more so than things that happen in the "real" world. Events are fantastic, mysterious, even mystical at times. But the magical part is that the two main characters navigate this fantastic landscape in ways that are original, true to themselves, and completely transparent to other characters (some pretty wild ones!) and to us. The lives of the two main characters are intertwined, though they never meet. Kafka, an intense teenage runaway encouraged by an alter ego, "a boy named Crow," to go out on his own, and Nakata, a humble damaged older man who seems "simple" but who has great powers, became so endearing and fascinating that I could hardly wait to see what happened next.

I loved this book, I admit partly because Kafka lives for a time in a library and Nakata can converse with cats! I listened to it on CD because I have a long trip to and from work. It is superbly narrated. There will be many more Haruki Murokami books in my future!

I loved Smilla’s Sense of Snow and so started reading The Quiet Girl with great anticipation. I gave it 125 pages and had to stop reading. The story so disjointed and the characters so enigmatic and opaque that I lost all interest. The writing itself is bad (writer or translator?). I hope the editor of this American edition fixes the hundreds of sentence fragments. They don’t work. In most cases, just taking out a few periods and putting the fragments together make perfectly good sentences. This is all too bad. The book has potential. I saw hints of the kind of writing that made Smilla’s Sense of Snow so compelling. For example, this sentence resonated: “When for a moment we let ourselves feel deep, sudden joy or sudden sorrow, reality begins to disintegrate.” Some wonderful insights. Terrible book. (My own sentence fragments!)