Tag Archives: Family relationships

FOR THE LOVE OF PEOPLE, BOOKS, HISTORY, AND ADVENTURE

Late Last Night Books

A good novel delves deep into the psyches of its characters while also telling a story that’s intriguing enough to keep the reader turning pages. The Bookshop of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson succeeds on both fronts by weaving three different types of stories about the same people into a seamless whole.

First, The Bookshop of Yesterdays is an adventure story developed through a clever scavenger hunt. For the first twelve years of her life, Miranda Brooks spends happy hours following the clues to scavenger hunts designed by her Uncle Billy. Then, after a hunt that leads Miranda to the puppy she’s always wanted but her mother refuses to let her keep, Uncle Billy disappears, and she doesn’t hear from him again until just before his death 16 years later.

ANOTHER GREAT BEGINNING, WITH AN AFTERWARD ABOUT FAMILY: ALL THE KING’S MEN 

Late Last Night Books

Among books I pulled off my shelves in search of especially interesting beginnings,  Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men struck me not only because it’s captivating but because it captivates by description. I must warn the reader, however, that this 1947 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is set primarily in the U.S. South between the two world wars, and its first-person narrator employs racist slurs as a matter of course. But, really, isn’t it better that we face our heritage as a country of slavery and racism?

So if you are willing to accept being shown in the national mirror something we are collectively ashamed of, I ask whether you’ve ever read better descriptive prose than Warren’s beginning of All the King’s Men or whether you’ve ever been more drawn into a book by a descriptive beginning?

ALL IN THE FAMILY—THE PERFECT CAULDRON FOR CONFLICT

Late Last Night Books

According to the 2011 FBI Uniform Crime Report, 24.8 percent of the-girl-who-stopped-swimmingU.S. murder victims were killed by family members. That’s a nearly a quarter of all murders. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that family violence (including assault, murder, robbery, and sex offenses) accounted for 11 percent of all reported and unreported violence between 1998 and 2002. Although we don’t have statistics for the flip side of family passions, anyone who has experienced a tragedy knows the profound role family love and support can play during those times. And also how deep an emotional wound inflicted by a family member can go. Because family relationships are among the most highly charged of any relationships in human experience, families offer the ideal set of characters for a novel’s essential conflict.