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Allan, Christa: Walking on Broken Glass

Abingdon Press, 352 pages
1st published: 2010

TWEETABLE REVIEW: 3.5* Fictional acct. of narrator's stint in rehab. Lovely writing, but 2nd half could be tightened. Christian lit. http://amzn.to/JPIXHw

Christa Allan's debut novel Walking on Broken Glass is narrated by 27-year-old Leah Thornton, who winds up going into rehab after a friend makes her realize she's drinking too much. Her Rolex-wearing husband is against the idea--in part because he likes to be the one making decisions, and in part because she won't be available for sex for a month--and we soon realize that he's a large part of Leah's problem. The book covers Leah's stint in rehab--including run-ins with other patients, with therapists, and with her visiting husband--and ends shortly after she gets out. There is no conclusion per se: life goes on, and Leah's still facing the issues that got her drinking in the first place, but she's now doing it sober. Like real life, in other words. There isn't a dramatic story being told here, and yet I found myself reading the book eagerly enough, perhaps primarily because I wanted to see Leah's husband get what was coming to him.

The book is a bit unusual, because it does read very much like a memoir rather than fiction. Allan doesn't tie things up neatly as one expects from fiction: a character who is important in rehab is forgotten once Leah goes home, for example; an issue with her father becomes important near the end of the book, but doesn't really matter to the rest of the story and could have been excised. But again, this is what happens in real life.

Allan's writing is often lovely, particularly in the first part of the book. The story feels more bloated in the second half and could probably have been tightened up. The second half is also more overtly Christian. Leah becomes more religious as a result of rehab, and begins talking about God a lot--and the people she meets talk about God a lot too, more than seems realistic. The conversion feels a bit too abrupt and too extreme, to me at least.

Friend, Catherine: Sheepish

Da Capo, 280 pages
1st published: 2011

TWEETABLE REVIEW:

3.5* A pleasant memoir about life, knitting, & middle age on a Minnesota sheep farm. The take-away: buy wool undies. amzn.to/K1XzRP

I've scarcely read anything in 2012 due to busyness on various fronts, but I did manage to squeeze in Catherine Friend's memoir Sheepish. The book is a pleasant enough read about the author's life on a farm in Minnesota, where she and her partner Melissa raise sheep and the occasional llama. It is an update on the sheepish goings-on that Friend first wrote about in Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn (which, however, I have not read). In Sheepish Friend discusses the sometimes dramatic business of farming, much of it having to do with lambing, as well as her forays into the world of knitting. Although initially resistant to the idea of joining the "fiber freaks," as she calls them, Friend winds up going whole hog, carding fleece and spinning her own yarn from her own sheep's wool and, of course, knitting it into socks. Friend spends part of the book questioning whether she wants to stay on the farm after fifteen years--part of a vague mid-life crisis she's going through which also finds her mourning the death of Elvis thirty years after his death. Friend's new-found a love of knitting winds up helping her through a difficult patch and renewing her affection for the rural life.

Friend writes a lot about wool in her book, its myriad uses and its qualities as a fabric: it's a natural insulator, it repels odors, it's durable, and so on. The main thing I'll take away from this book is the strong feeling that it would be a good idea to own some wool tee shirts.

McCall Smith, Alexander: In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

Anchor, 256 pages
1st published: 2005

Alexander McCall Smith's Botswana is rather like Andy Griffith's Mayberry, a world that may never have existed in fact, where people are generally decent and where, despite its problems, life is good -- particularly if one is lucky enough to be acquainted with Precious Ramotswe of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. It's a world I'm sorry to leave behind whenever I finish one of the books in McCall Smith's series. In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, the 6th installment in the series, finds Mma Ramotswe threatened by an unexpected source, for a wholly surprising reason. Uncharacteristically, it's a problem she cannot readily deal with, and long-time readers may well feel the urge to rise up in her defense, so real a character is she. This book also introduces two welcome additions to McCall Smith's cast, Rra Polopetsi, whose misfortunes are ostensibly increased when Mma Ramostwe nearly runs him down in her tiny white van, and Phuti Radiphuti, the manager of a furniture store who stumbles into the life of Mma Ramotswe's assistant, Grace Makutsi. The book, like others in the series, is sweet and simple and life-affirming. In a word, charming.

Maberry, Jonathan: Dead of Night

St. Martin's Griffin, 368 pages
1st published: 2011

Desdemona Fox is a hard-as-nails small-town cop whose military experience--she saw active duty in Afghanistan--comes in handy during a zombie apocalypse. Dez and her father-figure partner J.T. are the first on the scene at ground zero, a funeral home in Stebbins, PA, where a deadly virus claims its first victim: after an encounter with a not-quite-dead corpse, Doc Hartnup is quickly zombified and lurching around infecting others. The pathogen is 100% infectious and spreads through the transmission of body fluids, which primarily means bites. There's a lot of cannibalistic munching in this book, yet it never becomes a simple gore-fest. One could argue it's actually a love story. Will the embittered Desdemona survive the apocalypse and her own tragic personal history to finally stop rejecting her true love, Regional Satellite News reporter Billy Trout? Readers may be able to predict how that issue will be resolved, but they won't anticipate all the ins and outs of this story. The character of Desdemona is a bit clichéd, but she gets better as the book goes on, and the story winds up being quite entertaining and, I think, original: I'm not an expert on zombie literature, but I suspect the back story of these particular undead is atypical.

Cumming, Charles: The Spanish Game

St. Martin's, 338 pages
1st published: 2008

Charles Cumming's The Spanish Game picks up Alec Milius's story six years after the events covered in A Spy By Nature. Since his career as a spy ended in failure, Alec has been living in exile, feeling guilty about what he's done--though I'm honestly not sure why he feels so guilty about it--and worrying that it might come back to haunt him. When the book opens he's in Madrid, still living as if he's on the job, taking precautions against tails and so on, but it's not clear initially whether he's being sensible or paranoid. I wanted very much to like this book--the disappointed reader's lament--but I'm afraid I didn't. At least not enough. There are some things I do like: Alex's character, the logistics of his life in exile, the fact that we can't always know whether his concerns are reasonable. But like Cumming's first Milius novel, there's simply too much talk in this one, and I have less patience for it the second time around. This time it's about Basque separatism and the Iraq War and England's relationship with the U.S., and there's a convoluted plot that I gave up caring about early on. There are twists at the end, but by that time I was too lost to appreciate them. Cumming is talented and, his books suggest, very smart, and I'm sure his intricate plot and the political discussion will appeal to some, but not, I'm afraid, to me.