Left at the Mango Tree by Stephanie Siciarz
Genre: Fiction > Literary
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

DESCRIPTION: Left at the Mango Tree is the story of Almondine Orlean. Almondine is white. Everyone else on the island of Oh is black. Things like that happen there. The moon plays tricks. The leaves sing. And one day the island itself summons home the grown-up Almondine to piece together her black-and-white past. She will reconstruct the efforts of her grandfather—a book-loving, magic-hating, Customs and Excise Officer named Raoul—to explain his new white grandbaby, a case of island magic if ever there was. As Raoul struggles to prove otherwise (for surely otherwise it has to be!), Oh’s pineapples begin to disappear. Acres without a trace, and Officer Raoul must find out how and why. With help and hindrance from his favorite novel and his three real-life chums, Raoul will risk his reputation, his sanity, and even his life, to solve not one island riddle but two—and to reveal, if he dare, the secrets hidden between the shady mango and the shiny moon.

REVIEW: Throughout my reading of this shining debut novel, I felt like I was dancing.

The dance, it turns out, is the Island of Oh.

Through Siciarz's superb writing Oh breathes. It lives at the macro scale, comprised of ocean waters and currents, sandy shores, inland streams, undulating landscapes, whispering leaves on swaying trees—and people. All respond to the seemingly fickle, sometimes cantankerous, other times playful movements of sun, moon, rain and wind.

No surprise that the Islanders' lives mirror Oh's rhythms, merging and serving counterpoint within the dance.

Stunning, however, is the gorgeous writing that makes the dance of Oh so evident. While absorbing Siciarz's lyrical language, I felt responses deep in my gut, Oh's rhythms twitching my muscles and bobbing my head. More than once I resisted overt movements, lest other people spy me leaning fore or aft, port or starboard.

From the first page, Oh captures the disembarking passenger:

When you arrive at Oh, they don’t stamp your passport. You make your way bovinely through zigs and zags of blue plastic rope that navigate the gritty concrete of the airport floor, a sandpaper sea emptying into the river of Raoul. Behind the Formica counter from which he draws his authority, Raoul is an impressive sight. Flanked and backed by wooden cratefuls of pineapple, his black skin shines with subtle sweat against the pallor of the plywood slats, while the dull metal of his rounded specs vaguely obtrudes, like an artist’s signature on still life. His close-cropped hair and pronounced but gentle features foreshadow his demeanor, pointedly official, but given to flights of unofficial tolerance.

You reach his post, dulled by the sight, the scent, the oddity of the scene, and extend your passport with the trepidation of one who desires what another has the power to refuse. Raoul takes the document and thumbs the pages. He glances at you, at your picture, and back at you again. This he does less to verify your identity than to ponder how it is you came to be from where you’re from. Were it only as simple as a passport!

When he’s satisfied, he types your name on a carbon-paper form in his typewriter that records your arrival, date of birth, and eye color in triplicate, which he prises from the roller’s grip with an impatient “aaah.” He removes the dry end of an ink stamp from between his teeth and expels a “huh, huh” as he pounds it first onto his inkpad and then onto your triplicate form one time. Then in a single, masterful sleight of hand, Raoul completes the transaction, and you find yourself, passport and creased copy three in your left palm, a pineapple in your right. And so to the rhythmic aaah-huh-huhs of Raoul the line slowly scrapes forward, his airy triads punctuated with a My word! or a What’s this? or a hesitant Thank you very much....

From collecting one's baggage and exiting the airport—where one meets Bang, a Pineapple-cutter extraordinaire—, to riding stickily (the pineapple) from airport to town in a taxicab driven by Nat, another featured character, Oh has the reader in its thrall.

The mystery that weaves throughout the novel cleaves no less to the rhythms and fickleness of Oh's moods than do its individual characters. And its ultimate resolution, while too coincidental to be believed had the mystery occurred in a city setting, makes perfect sense on the island of Oh, whose internally consistent rhythms must be honoured.

Siciarz has written a second novel, Away with the Fishes, which also takes place on Oh and involves another mystery.

I shall be making the return trip. The author's superb writing, wondrous language, enchanting storytelling and fully-imagined world are too much for this reader to resist.

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Legacy Code by Autumn Kalquist
Genre: Science Fiction > Dystopia, Young Adult
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

DESCRIPTION: The last humans fled a dying Earth 300 years ago, but there was something they couldn’t leave behind: the Legacy Code. Every colonist in the fleet carries mangled genes that damage the unborn, and half of all pregnancies must be terminated.

The day Era Corinth is supposed to find out if her baby has the Defect, her ship suffers a hull breach. And it may not have been an accident. As the investigation unfolds, Era begins to question everything she’s been taught about the fleet, their search for a new Earth, and the Defect. But the answers she seeks were never meant to be found.

REVIEW: This book started off well enough and the writing overall (grammar, structure) is good. However, the story began to fizzle about halfway through and became repetitive, as though the author was attempting to fill pages.

This isn't a long book anyway and I came upon its completion sooner than expected.

As to the ending, it contained neither the climax one expects of an ending nor the required cliff-hanger to set the stage for a sequel. Had anyone asked me an hour after I'd finished the Legacy Code how it ended, I couldn't have told them. In other words, I found the story forgettable, which is unfortunate because the concept wasn't bad.

I won't be reading the sequel.

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Brotherhood by A.B. Westrick
Genre: Historical Fiction > USA Civil War
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

DESCRIPTION: The year is 1867, the South has been defeated, and the American Civil War is over. But the conflict goes on. Yankees now patrol the streets of Richmond, Virginia, and its citizens, both black and white, are struggling to redefine their roles and relationships. By day, fourteen-year-old Shadrach apprentices with a tailor and sneaks off for reading lessons with Rachel, a freed slave, at her school for African-American children. By night he follows his older brother to the meetings of a group whose stated mission is to protect Confederate widows like their mother. But as the true murderous intentions of the brotherhood—now known as the Ku Klux Klan—are revealed, Shad finds himself trapped between old loyalties and what he knows is right.

A powerful and unflinching story of a family caught in the enormous social and political upheaval of the period of Reconstruction.

REVIEW: A compelling story, on a perspective of the USA Civil War that needs to be told more often.

In general, I agree with most reviewers' comments who gave it a high rating, and for the first half of the book, I thought it to be a four-star effort.

However, one critical feature of Shadrach's thought process didn't ring true and it happened to be one that the author took care to utilize time and time again.

Once someone realizes or learns something they hadn't known before, vacillation between their new view of reality and their old one very quickly, if not immediately, dissipates. That is, one cannot un-know something just because one would like to go back to ignorance. One cannot return to the way things were before the rose-coloured glasses were removed - not without deliberate effort to deny the facts.

As revealed in the first half of The Brotherhood, Shadrach was initially attracted to and supported the Brotherhood (KKK) because it helped him 'feel like a man' and gave him, for the first time, a sense of belonging. Fine. Makes sense given his family life, including a brutal older brother, acute poverty, and the burning resentments of 1867 Richmond.

But then, Shadrach witnesses the KKK's brutal, sinister side - including a murder - and was horrified by it. Despite that, the author has Shadrach vacillating too many times to count between supporting and rejecting the Brotherhood.

Shadrach's vacillating was the focal point of the latter half of the book. It felt like the author was just trying to fill pages and it became so tiresome, so stretching credibility, that I was tempted to put the book aside. In the end, I think the author did a disservice to his character. He had drawn Shadrach as being nothing like the brother, but instead being bright, thoughtful, even kind. A character such as that wouldn't take half a book to get it right.

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