Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda, 2010, * * * *

Secret Daughter is an unflinching yet compassionate story of mothers and daughters in a story that moves between two worlds and two families -- one struggling to survive in the fetid slums of Mumbai, India and the other grappling to forge a cohesive family despite diverging cultural identities in Northern California. The main characters are two mothers: Kavita Merchant, the impoverished villager who knows too well what happens to unwanted girls, and Somer Whitman, the American pediatrician who marries a fellow physician born in India.  Somer's infertility leads her and her husband, Krishnan Thakkar, to adopt Kavita's baby, Asha, from the Indian orphanage where Kavita had surrendered her. Gowda describes the cultural fears and shocks confronting a Western woman in India, followed by the insecurities attending Somer back home as she strives to mother a child who looks like Krishnan, but not her.  The story alternates viewpoints between Kavita and Somer, with occasional chapters told through the eyes of their husbands.  Later, a teenage Asha takes over much of the narrative as she journeys to India to meet Krishnan's family and search for her identity -- unaware that her birth mother never stopped wondering about the daughter she gave up. The sounds, scents and sights of India are vividly drawn, pulling you deeply into a culture that many have only glimpsed in movies like Slumdog Millionaire.  Two worlds collide, then meld, in a story that intimately considers how we all are shaped, through fate or free will, nurture or nature, by the astounding power of family love.

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, 2010, * * * *

From the 1936 Olympics to WWII and Japan's most brutal POW camps, Hillenbrand's heart-wrenching new book is thousands of miles and a world away from the racing circuity of her bestselling book Seabiscuit.  The hero of this book is Louie Zamperini, a young Italian-American from Torrance, California. He was expected to be the first person to run a four-minute mile and after an astonishing but losing race at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, he was hoping for gold in the 1940 games. The war ended those dreams forever when,  as an Army Air Corps bombardier,  his B-24 crashed into the Pacific in May 1943.  After a record-breaking 47 days adrift on a shark-encircled life raft with is pal and pilot, Rusell Allen "Phil" Phillips, they were captured by the Japanese.  In the 'theater of cruelty' that was the Japanese POW camp network, Louie landed in the cruelst theaters of all: Omori and Naoetsu, under the control. of Corporal Mutsuhiro Watanabe, a pathologically brutal sadist, know as "the Bird."  By war's end Louie was near death when the camp was liberated in August 1945 but he was not free.  Haunted by his dreams, he was obsessed with vengenance, and drank to forget.  Untimately Louise had a defiant and unbreakable spirit and with the help of his wife, Cynthia Applewhite, he builds a new life.  In one of several sections where Hillenbrand steps back for a larger view, she writes movingly of the thousands of postwar Pacific PTSD sufferers who got no help for their as yet unrecognized illness.  It is impossible to condense the rich, grandular detail of the narrative of the atrocities comm itted against American POWs in Japan and the courage of Louie and his fellow POWs.  Hillenbrand's triumph is that in telling Louie's story she tells the stories of thousands whose suffering has been mostly forgotten and restores to our collective memory the tale of heroism, cruelty, life, death, joy, suffering remorselessness and redemption.

Stoner by John Williams, 1965, * * * * *

Stoner is written in the most plainspoken of styles...its hero being an obscure academic who endures a series of personal and professional agonies.  Yet the novel is utterly riveting because the author, John Williams, treats his characters with such tender and ruthless honesty.  You care about the characters whether you want to or not.  It is a novel of academia, unfulfilled hope, and a life not completely led.  It is basically a simple novel about a guy who goes to college and becomes a teacher but,  for some reason,  is fascinating. Its hero, William Stoner, is the son of hard-wroking, dirt-poor farmers from whom he inherits a taciturn stoicism born of sheer adversity.  Stoner enters the university in 1910 to study agriculture but his life change irrevocably when he comes upon literature in a sophomore survey course.  His future mentor humiliates him by asking him to explain Shakespare's Sonnet 73, a poem about love and loss that foreshadows his own future. Only two passions matter in Stoner's life, love and learning, and in a sense he fails at both. Stoner's deeply ingrained reticence is a keystone of the novel.  This is the story of an ordinary man, seemingly thwarted at every turn, but also of the knotty integrity he preserves and the deep inner life behind the impassive facade. Caught in an empty shell of a marriage, though too stoical to end it, he bonds deeply with his young daughter until his resentful wife evicts him from his daughter's life.  Stoner responds with a helpless sense of resignation but in his 40s begins an affair with a talented scholar half his age, which leads to an interlude of unlooked-for happiness.  Though the affair is broken up by Stoner's academic nemesis, who threatens scandal, it offers a hint of paradise that hovers dreamily over the rest of the novel.  Few stories this sad could be so secretly triumphant, or exhilarating.  Williams brings to Stoner's fate a quality of attention, a rare empathy, that shows us why this unassuming life was worth living.

If I Stay by Gayle Forman, 2009, * * * *

The last normal moment that Mia, a talented cellist, can remember is being in the car with her family.  Then she is standing outside her body beside their mangled Buick and her parent's corpses, watching herself and her little brother being tended by paramedics.  As she ponders her state ("Am I dead?  I actually have to ask myself this"), Mia is whisked away to a hospital, where, her body in a coma, she reflects on the past and tries to decide whether to fight to live. Via Mia's thoughts and flashbacks, Forman (Sisters in Sanity) expertly explores the teenager's life, her passion for classical music and her strong relationships with her family, friends and boyfriend, Adam. Mia's singular perspective (which will recall Alice Sebold's adult novel, The Lovely Bones) also allows for powerful portraits of her friends and family as they cope.  "Please don't die.  If you die, there's going to be one of those cheesy Princess Diana memorials at school," prays Mia's friend Kim.  "I know you'd hate that kind of thing."  Intensely moving, the novel will force you to take a look at your life and the people and things that make it worth living.  A sophisticated, layered, and beautiful story about the power of family and friends, the choices we all make and the ultimate choice Mia commands. I truly appreciated her family and friends where everyone is their own character with specific traits and quirks and, amazingly, this is not a dysfunctional, but loving, family. Although this is listed in the library under Young Readers, I would highly recommend it to anyone.

Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt, 2010, * * * * *

On December 8, 2007, Amy Rosenblatt Solomon collapsed on a treadmill prior to going to work and died from an asymptomatic heart condition.  Roger Rosenblatt and his wife Ginny drove from their Long Island home to be with Any's husband and their three grandchildren: six-year-old Jessica, four-year-old Sammy, and one-year-old James, aka "Bubbies."   The memoir take place during the year that follows Amy's death, as Roger and Ginny, called "Boppo" and "Mimi" by their grandchildren, quickly reaccustom themselves to the choreography of the everyday and the extraordinary including bedtime stories, talking toys, playdates, homework, family vacations, holidays and nonstop questions.  As he marvels at the strength of his son-in-law, a surgeon, and the tenacity and skill of his wife, a former kindergarten teacher, Boppo attends each day to "the one household duty I have mastered" - preparing the morning toast perfectly to each child's liking. If there is one shortcoming to "Making Toast," it is that the writing often feels dispassionate.  The descriptions of tough times don't match up with the calm, unemotional explanations. However, the memoir commands your attention by other means, including the format -- there are no chapters -- only journal style entries each of which makes your heart ache. "Making Toast" is a bleakly beautiful scatter plot of grief which is a balm to read.

The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra, 2005, * * * *

The Swallows of Kabul is a dazzling novel written with compassion and exquisite detail about the memtality of Islamic fundamentalists and the complexities of the Muslim world,  Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of an Algerian army officer named Mohammed Moulessehould who adopted a woman's pseudonym to avoid military censorship.  He only revealed his true identity after leaving the army in 2001 and going into exile in France.  Set in Kabul under the rule of the Taliban, this extraordinary novel takes readers into the lives of two couples: Mohsen, who comes from a family of wealthy shopkekepers whom the Taliban has destroyed; Zunaira, his wife, exceedingly beautiful, who was once a brilliant teacher and is now no longer allowed to leave her home without an escort or covering her face.  Intersecting their world is Atiq,  a prison keeper, a man has sincerely adopted the Taliban ideology and struggles to keep his faith, and his wife, Musarrat, who once rescued Atiq, and is now dying of sickness and despair.   The novel brings readers into the hot, dusty streets, of Kabul and offers them an unflinching but compassionate insight into a society that violence and hypocrisy have brought to the edge of despair.  However, the way that reality is narrated and ultimately redefined, once more proves the power of fiction to turn our despair into hope, to restore our stolen sense of dignity and humanity and to desire life when death seems to be the safest refuge.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, 2009, * * * * *

It is Enniscorthy, in Ireland's County Wexford, in the early 1950s and Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home.  When a job is offered in America it is clear to everyone that she must go.  Leaving her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation. Slowly, however, the pain of parting is buried beneath the rhythms of her new life -- until she begins to realize that she as found a sort of happiness.  As she falls in love, news comes from home that forces her back to Enniscorthy, not to the constrictions of her old life, but to new possibilities which conflict deeply with the life she has left behind in Brooklyn.  In the quiet character of Eilis Lacey, Colm Toibin has created a memorable heroine and in Brooklyn he has written a luminous novel of devastating power.  The portrait Toibin paints of Brooklyn in the early '50s is affectionate but scarcely dewy-eyed.  Eilis encounters discrimnation in variouis forms -- against families, againsts blacks, against Jews, against lower-class Irish -- and finds Manhattan more intimidating than alluring. Toibin's prose is graceful but never showy, and his characters are interesting and believable.  As a study of the quest for home and the difficulty of figuring out where home really is, Brooklyn  has a universality that goes far beyond the specific details of Eilis's struggle.