Older fans of Harry Potter have found their next big thing! Young adults and adults who are young at heart have discovered the magic and thrill of Stephenie Meyer and her new book The Host has just hit the stores, providing everything that her readers have grown to love! This is a stand alone story (and possibly a new series?), but it is no less enthralling as we wait for the fourth installment in the Twilight/ New Moon/ Eclipse series.

First, for the uninitiated, Ms. Meyer has made her mark with a captivating
saga about a teenage heroine named Bella who is in love with a vampire
named Edward. Star-crossed? Just wait. There's a love triangle that
develops with Bella's friend Jacob who becomes Edward's rival. Jacob
also happens to be a werewolf.

So the question everyone wants to know is, can Stephenie Meyer pull off
the same magic with new characters and a new scenario? Absolutely!

This time the action centers on the fact that aliens have taken over the world. This particular variety of alien is a parasite or a symbiote, depending on your perspective. The humans definitely think that they are under a body snatcher form of attack, although the book is told from the point of view of an alien named Wanderer so the reader is going to find himself or herself swayed by her opinions. Wanderer has lived in many other worlds (and bodies) before coming to earth, and shares her perspective with the reader in this first person narrative. The problem she faces on Earth is a bit different, however. Her host - a young woman named Melanie - loses control of her muscles, but retains her identity, emotions, and memories in what Wanderer now thinks of as HER brain. This power struggle is the core conflict of the book, and what happens to Melanie, Wanderer, and the human race as a whole is an engrossing read.

And to keep things interesting, once again there's a love triangle, or a love quadrilateral to be more precise. Wanderer begins to be drawn to a different character while Melanie continues to have feelings for Jacob. Ah, modern love! Perhaps this was enough for Little, Brown to market the book as a Adult Fiction title rather than Young Adult genre, but kids, while it does get steamy, your parents don't need to worry about the PG-13 rating.

If you miss J. K. Rowling, and haven't yet met Stephenie Meyer, do yourself a favor and try The Host! And then go back and read Twilight and the rest!

This is the second notable novel that has appeared within the last six months about a white slave catcher and an escaped slave woman. The first was Soul Catcher by Michael White, which I wrote about in my October blog on American Journeys. Each of these sagas has its unique contribution to understanding the time and the people of this era of history. While the first focused on an educated and reflective slave catcher caught in "the trade" by his own weaknesses, the second focuses on the woman and her visionary ability to see what she believes is the future of her people. The first looks at the awkward community formed by the slaves and the slave catchers as they journey back to the South. The second examines the community that free blacks and slaves create under the nose of the whites and the "code" that enables them to openly pass secret messages about runaways in public.

James McBride first won adulation for his portrayal of his childhood and of his widowed mother's determination to raise and properly educate her family. He established a reputation as an engrossing story-teller with the vignettes he pulled from his own experiences and the memories he wrangled from his mother, who was reluctant to reveal her past as the child of Jewish immigrants who ran away to marry a black Baptist preacher. The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother is an unusual but nonetheless quintessentially American tale in which the author searches to understand his heritage and family origins.

His current book, Song Yet Sung, is fictional but is no less rooted in American culture, and no less an exploration of American origins. At one point, it imagines that the predecessors of Martin Luther King, Jr. might have been such people as are characters in this story, and by extension that this is a story that belongs to all of us who yearn for freedom for want, worry, and concern, and dream of a sense of purpose, inner peace and security, the ability to achieve our dreams.

The story has a local flavor as it takes place on the eastern shore of Southern Maryland - a spit of land between the Chesapeake and the Atlantic Ocean, where watermen earn a hard living scraping oysters off the sea floor. It portrays the unusually interdependent relations among slaves, free blacks, poor watermen, slave catchers (and the hardened and deceitful slave stealers), and wealthy landowners. There are many character threads to follow: a wild man living in the marshes, a young man secretly planning his break for freedom, a white woman and her slave who both were widowed in the same fishing accident, a cruel and lawless band who will lock up any black person free or slave and sell them down South.

The principal character is a woman named Liz; she is running for freedom and has the distinction of being "two-headed" - she has dreams that reveal the future. This future seen in visions and the characters she meets in her present suggest that even legally free people enslave themselves to other forms of bondage, and freedom will be a longer time coming than a simple flight to the North. Before she ever meets Denwood, the slave catcher who pursues her, other slaves tell him of her visions and interpretations of reality, and the messages begin to make sense to him. He has also suffered in his life, working hard with little reward, feeling loss of love, despair, and loneliness.

"He realized with a bit of shock...that their lives were exact mirrors of his, filled with silent, roaring, desperate, human fury and humiliation. He realized at that moment that he despised them even as he admired them. How could you like someone and hate them at the same time?" But he discovers that they seem to know more about the way the world operates than any of the white people who have been his companions. Like Cain in Michael White's Soul Catcher, he admires them and understands them, and yet needs them to accomplish his goals.

"He disliked making deals with slaves and free blacks. It hampered him in too many ways, mostly internally, because in making deals with them, they became more human to him, and in doing so - try as he might to resist the feeling - they became less slave and more man to him. he could not make a deal with a pig, or a dog, or a piece of pork. But if a man says to another man or woman, I'll give you this for that, then who are you dealing with? An equal? Or chattel? But he had no choice. She was enemy or friend."

As Liz's visions become clearer and Denwood's circular pursuit of her continues, Mr. McBride weaves in more of the straightforward religious conviction that keeps hopes up, and which he revealed in The Color of Water as so instrumental in his own upbringing. A free black man working for the Gospel Train, as they call the Underground Railroad, describes his perspective to the Dreamer, Liz,

-No need to fret about what's done, Clarence said matter-of-factly.
It's God's world. He washes you clean. He makes you whole. He puts
rain in your garden and sunshine in your heart. Just pray when you get
free, child. Pray for what you've done and what you gonna do. Lotta
folks around here believe in you. I don't, but lots do. You got some
kind of purpose, they say. It's got to be.
-But I don't know who I am.
-Well, there it is, he said ruefully. That's a problem, ain't it. If
you don't know who you are child. I'll tell you: you's a child of God.
-With all I seen, I don't know that I believe in God anymore, she said.
- Don't matter, the old man said. He believes in you.

Another epic tale that gives insight into our American story. Click to reserve your copy of Song Yet Sung (Riverhead, 1594489726, $25.95) now.

I know many readers prefer a novel because it allows them to enter into an author's world and vision more deeply and experience the story for a longer time. It may seem that a short story just gets started when it's over, and the reader must begin again with other characters. And generally, I share this desire for what one might describe as a completely realized experience, and understand the perception that a short story may be simply a warm-up exercise for the story-teller to try out a possible subject for a novel. However, with the guidance of Jhumpa Lahiri, I have discovered a different perspective.
Ms. Lahiri likely needs no introduction. Her debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the year it was published, a rare honor. And she followed this with a beautifully sensitive and nuanced novel, The Namesake,... which last year was interpreted into a similarly accomplished film by renowned director Mira Nair, bringing still more attention to Ms. Lahiri's writing. Now on April 1st, her long-awaited second collection of short stories has arrived - Unaccustomed Earth.

My own bias now is quite frankly to favor her stories. Her writing style - so accessible, so descriptive and detailed - is particularly well-adapted to the distillation of mood and characters into a short, memorable moment that this medium entails. A story allows a writer to focus on - and a reader to remember - clear details that linger long after you have set down the book. As when visiting a museum, and lingering over a particularly well-realized painting, it is possible to appreciate elegantly chosen strokes and simplicity of expression, there is a similar effect to her writing, and so I was and am particularly excited to review her new collection.

There are clear differences between her first book, and this one. In Interpreter of Maladies, her characters explored their ability to integrate more or less successfully into a society that had expectations of them, and to come to terms with the expectations and contradictions they discovered in themselves. The mood was youthful and vital, slightly irreverent. In contrast, it seems that the central characters in the new collection have matured - in both concerns and personal choices. They are more weighted down by the expectations that the younger set may have tossed away more frivolously.

Initially, I missed the earlier style and resisted her more recent subject matter. She is about my age and has a personal background educationally and socially similar to me and my friends and peers. In her personal life, she has married, is raising children of her own, and now creeping irresistibly into her writing, we see the middle-aged subjects of family responsibility to both aging parents and young children and the accompanying expectations. Isn't this ground that has been covered before?

As I continued reading, it became clear that in spite of these ordinary circumstances, she retains the richness I previously associated with her writing. The characters themselves are aware of the choices they have made and of the youthfulness and impetuousness that are no longer as much a part of their lives. As they think about their past selves and reflect on where they currently are, complex palettes of emotions are revealed - loss, longing, the pressure of social obligations, and a counter-balancing determination to make the most of where they are now. Once in awhile, they are able to rest in a fleeting effortlessness of being and self-acceptance. It is this slowly developing awareness in each of them and of the reader in understanding them that makes each story and the collection as a whole so worthwhile.

I'm going to conclude by stating the obvious, that while Ms. Lahiri and many of her characters have a heritage that may be different from yours, the experiences she describes are shared by all humans maturing into the webs of responsibilities of family, friends, and intimate relationships. Once again her writing is a gift.

Unaccustomed Earth (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House, 0307265730, $25.00) is a Buyer's Choice selection so by buying from Olsson's you will save 20% on the cover price.

- Andrew

It is peculiar perhaps to name a book for a character who is no longer present. The new PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel by Kate Christensen begins with a New York Times obituary. Oscar Feldman, The Great Man of the title, has just passed away, and while the book is apparently about the race for two biographers to complete their studies of the life and relationships of the deceased artist, this merely serves as a pretext to explore the vibrantly fascinating WOMEN who shared his life - his mistress, his wife, and his sister.

The successive segments are organized around interviews with each of the women - Teddy St. Clair, Abigail Feldman, and Maxine Feldman; however, these are just the context in which larger developments take place. Both through their introspection and their verbalized self-revelation, the women contemplate their relationships with Oscar and with each other. While not exactly grieving the loss of this major figure in their lives, his absence and the presence of these two both intrusive and curious biographers provoke them to reexamine who he was and who they are. As a result, they undergo self-examinations and reflections on their emotional engagements not only with him, but also with their female friends, partners, and family members, as well as these biographers.

The genius of the book, and in Ms. Christensen's writing style, and really the reason it seems for the award, is that each interaction with another major and minor characters, reveals a different aspect of the personality of the principal people. Surprise, these characters really do behave differently, depending on who they are with. Often they even surprise themselves! This effect is what lures the reader on. Initially, the women are all reticent towards the interviewing and interloping biographers, Henry and Ralph, and they express this is varied ways. Variously, deliberately or unconsciously, they display genuine or false welcoming behavior, agreeing to the interviews and conversations, and then participating with (again variously, even in the course of one conversation) complicity, confrontation, outright hostility, interrogating them in return. The interviewers' skill in handling the situation or lack of comprehension of what the women are doing determines the course of how they interpret the man.

So conceptually, the novel is deftly constructed and unusual in its style. Cleverly offering to reveal the Oscar Feldman's character, the novel is really only tangentially descriptive of him, elaborating in his absence who he was by the relationships that formed around him, rather than with him, . . . and that continue to grow, change, and develop now that he is gone. Try this newly acclaimed novel, as it is absolutely worthy of attention and the award.
The Great Man (Doubleday, 0385518455, $23.95)

- Andrew

Susan Choi previously has put herself on the literary radar screen with The Foreign Student and American Woman, both books which approach the concept of people who are social outsiders, through their own perception and behavior and the viewpoint of others. However, she also makes the point that her characters are uniquely and perhaps even prototypically American, although in ways that we might prefer not to be reminded. Her new novel A Person of Interest follows this same theme, striking closer to current present realities by addressing violence on a university campus and the repercussions in one alienated professor's life.

At the beginning of the book, a bomb goes off, and sets in motion not only the destruction and death, grief counseling and memorial services one might expect, but more explicitly to the point of the book a cycle of introspection and investigation into the life of the principal character, a mathematics professor named Lee.

It is should be clearly stated from the outset that Lee is not an endearing individual. In the course of his life, he, somewhat unwittingly yet rather systematically, has alienated himself from fellow faculty members, withdrawn from students, and emotionally cut off family and friends. Why he did this is never entirely clear, perhaps as that would give too much insight into a complex and, as a result, compelling personality, but in the course of the book, one does develop some sympathy for him as misunderstood and misjudged. In spite of his awkward and abrupt social practices, he becomes increasingly intriguing to the reader - and in due course, as a possible suspect, or at least "a person of interest", to the FBI .

Lee's origin is always cloaked in mystery. He is described as coming from a Southeast Asian country, but it is never identified, partly, I'm sure, to maintain the distance that his students and and colleagues must feel, and partly because his behavior implies that there is some trauma, war-induced or otherwise, in his past that he himself would prefer forgotten. In this regard, Ms. Choi's style is supremely effective.

I think Ms. Choi has deliberately created a reading experience that replicates what Lee's students and colleagues might experience by interacting with him. From the start, his actions are accompanied by half-realized motivations and half-articulated or entirely suppressed explanations. He carries his briefcase in front of him like a shield; he dresses in rumpled clothes assuming that because he doesn't pay attention to his appearance, others won't either. By trying to pass silently through the corridors of the university focusing on scholarship and speaking seldom, he ends up creating more extreme reactions than he intends.

When the portion of flashbacks begins to focus on Lee's ex-wife - Aileen, it is a liberating relief to be permitted some variety to the emotional content, and more clarity to his emotional composition. It is here that one begins to understand him and sympathize with him a bit more, although he continues to be insulated from truly understanding how best to connect with those around him. And Ms. Choi has tautly stretched that important line of keeping the reader wanting more with slowly-developing characterization and suspense, but offering just enough to allow continuing engagement.