Diane C. McPhail plucks from history an audacious young woman, and using the available historical record, brings her to life in the novel FOLLOW THE STARS HOME. Lydia Roosevelt, née Latrobe, daughter of prominent DC architect Benjamin Latrobe, wife of inventor Nicholas Roosevelt, narrates her life-defining adventure story, accompanying her husband, along with their toddler and newborn, on the first steam-powered paddle boat trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. 

Will they make it, unscathed? Will a successful trip revolutionize travel and trade in the young nation, eager to grow? Will their collaboration, Lydia's ingenious practicality and intimate involvement at every turn, and Nicholas' determination and engineering genius, change history? Even though we know the answers, the author maintains a high level of suspense. ??

Given the enormity of the challenges they face, everything from childbirth to navigating through the famous New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-12, readers can expect to learn a lot and experience vicariously, along with historical figures, moments of grace under pressure. That's the beauty of historical fiction, especially ones that are based on real people whose stories might otherwise be lost. ??

In choosing to use first person narration, the author made another style choice, to adapt a style of writing that we might find in letters from that time period. While this helped Lydia come across as an early 19th Century character more realistically, it also at times felt overly sentimental and repetitive. She revisits the tension between her father and husband multiple times, almost to the point where I wondered if readers were being asked to distance themselves from Lydia. ??

Overall, the writing is excellent, and Lydia's philosophical musings, her metaphorical likening of the river to the passage of time, and especially the high level of excitement so deftly conveyed made this book enjoyable to read. Much to discuss for book clubs.

The first person narrator of THE FUNERAL CRYER by Wenyan Lu is both a fully-developed denizen of a rural village in northeast China in real time and Everywoman. As a professional mourner at funerals, she needs to summarize and evaluate the lives of the deceased and lead the mourners through the process of witnessing, grieving, and reengaging, moving forward with their own lives, that is, the cycle from sorrow to joy. Her work, with unique access to the stories and secrets of local residents, forces her to consider the big questions of life's ultimate meaning and apply these lessons to her own life. It also makes her an outcast in her community, a spokeswoman and harbinger of death, an authentic voice, a nameless witness to the fragility of life.

Add in the fact that the funeral cryer and  the unemployed "husband" began their married life as a comedy duo, for some sense of the novel's irony and complexity. As an entertainment, this book is not for everyone but it would lend itself to vigorous book club discussion.

The Adversary, Canadian novelist Michael Crummey's latest, is historical fiction in the same vein as the work of Hawthorne and Melville. Set in a remote fishing village on the north coast of Newfoundland in the late 1700s, the novel is impressively atmospheric, as its characters inexorably catapult toward a seemingly predetermined collision. Big philosophical questions abound. A brother-sister rivalry opens and closes the novel, an aborted wedding, funerals galore and the entire local community as collateral damage. The specter of death hovers over every character. If personal animosity is not enough, the community suffers from disastrous weather, rampant hunger, pandemic-worthy disease, lack of medical care, outlaw justice, fluctuating catches, an economic system similar to indentured labor or tenant farming. ?It is hard to rate a book like this. While I did not relish reading it, I greatly admired Crummey's powers of description, his extensive use of local Newfoundland, sometimes even archaic language, and the dramatic insights into how people survive, for instance, with help from the local healer, an outlandish character I was always happy to see arrive.  Finally, I have to mention the amazing variety of sexual innuendo, attack and insult Crummey manages to preserve in this book, probably doubling my entire previous stock of such phrases. In fact, I actually had to laugh at some of them, despite the ambient horror.

The Stone Home, Crystal Hana Kim's latest novel, is a hard book to read. It is a fictionalized story based on atrocities recently come to light. In the 1980s, the government of South Korea sanctioned the establishment of reformatories, basically incarceration and forced labor for people snatched off the streets and considered undesirable.

At first, I found the book difficult, maybe because of its structure (a one year period in the 80s alternating with an extended meetup thirty years later), or maybe because of the larger cast of characters and the unfamiliar social organization of the reformatory. Not everything is spelled out, although the intense relationship between a mother-daughter duo and a pair of brothers dominates the intertwining narrative.

As I got into the story, I found the graphic depiction of the violence and downright cruelty difficult to read. Many acts of goodness and solidarity propelled the story forward and provided the characters respite from the grueling trauma of their incarceration but the overall takeaway, rendered in beautiful and precise language, was, for me, despair about what we humans can feel in our hearts and perpetrate on each other. Maybe that is good subject matter for our times.

For the right book club, The Stone Home would be perfect. Even its title could be unpacked in discussion.

Ben Fountain's Devil Makes Three takes place in Haiti between the 1991 coup of Aristide and the 1992 US election of Bill Clinton. What Fountain does not know about Haiti, he has researched well, from the intricacies of scuba diving the reefs around the island, to contemporary theories of post-colonialism, to the many schemes, corruption and good will gone awry of political and power-hungry factions. All this information comes seamlessly through memorable characters: Matt and Alix, the diving duo, Shelly-Audrey, the CIA undercover political attaché, Misha, Alec's sister, home in Haiti, on hiatus from her Ph.D. studies at Brown, and the large number of well-developed FAd'H, ambassadorial staff, civilian Haitian characters. Fountain has unmatched, uncanny abilities of description. Several times, I reread sentences because he lit up the familiar in a totally new way. Devil Makes Three presents a strong case for the idiocy of violence, war, human to human cruelty; it has adventure, romance, voodoo, pathos, history. But sometimes I thought, Fountain gave us too much of a good thing.