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The Bible Salesman
by Clyde Edgerton
Published 2008 by Little Brown and Company
Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9780316117517
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Jacket Notes:
Preston Clearwater has been a criminal since he began stealing from the Army during the Second World War. Back on the road in post-war North Carolina, he picks up hitchhiking Henry Dampier, and immediately recognizes Henry as just the associate he needs to help Clearwater's car-theft ring.
REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 06/16/2008
In this rollicking, rambling road novel of the post-WWII South, Preston Clearwater, a dead ringer for Clark Gable, steals cars and passes himself off as an undercover FBI agent. His mark is naïve 20-year-old Bible salesman Henry Dampier, whom Preston convinces to drive the cars to various paint shops (telling Henry that they have infiltrated a car-theft ring), while Preston follows in his own legally registered Chrysler. Preston undertakes more audacious forms of crime, while earnest Henry has a reunion with his fundamentalist family, listens to his cousin's scheme to market a new ad gimmick (called "the bumper sticker"), falls in love with roadside fruit-stand proprietor Marlene Greene and even manages to sell a few Bibles along the way. The hitch is his involvement with Preston: Henry will have to get wise to preserve all he has gained. Too many flashbacks to Henry's Baptist roots slow him down on the way to the novel's suspenseful climax and moving epilogue, but the result is one of the better takes on Southern Bible salesman buddy stories since Moses Pray and Addie Pray of Paper Moon. (Aug.)
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The Seamstress
by Frances De Pontes Peebles
Published 2008 by Harper
Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9780060738877
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Jacket Notes:
An enthralling novel of love and courage, passion and adventure that brings to life a faraway time and place, "The Seamstress" is an epic saga, rich in depth and vision, that heralds the arrival of a supremely talented new writer.
REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 03/31/2008
This lavishly detailed if overlong debut novel set in 1920s and '30s Brazil follows two sisters who share excellent sewing skills, but take divergent paths into adulthood. Crippled by a childhood accident and mocked for her deformities, Luzia is considered unmarriageable. So after a bandit kidnaps her, she realizes that marrying the outlaw leader may be her only chance at independence and happiness. Beautiful Emília, yearning for the refinements of the big city, spurns her many rural suitors, but-reeling from her sister's abduction and her aunt's subsequent death-enters a disastrous marriage with a wealthy, suave stranger who has plenty of untoward secrets and a mother who treats Emília like dirt. The sisters' paths collide after Luzia, now mythologized as a vicious criminal known as the Seamstress, becomes targeted by Emília's criminologist father-in-law, unaware of the two women's connection. Though a good number of passages could have been left on the cutting-room floor, the leisurely pace and attention to detail immerse the reader in both gilded halls and unsavory bandit camps. (Aug.)
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People of the Whale
by Linda Hogan
Published 2008 by W. W. Norton & Company
Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9780393064575
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Jacket Notes:
From a writer with unparalleled gifts for truth and magic (Barbara Kingsolver) comes a powerful story of a Vietnam veteran torn between his war experience and his Native American community.
REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 06/16/2008
In telling a story of the fictional A'atsika, a Native people of the American West Coast who find their mythical origins in the whale and the octopus, Hogan (Mean Spirit) employs just the right touch of spiritualism in this engrossing tale. When Thomas Witka Just succumbs to peer pressure and joins the army, then is sent to Vietnam, Ruth Small is pregnant with his child. In an attempt to prevent an atrocity, Thomas kills fellow soldiers and deserts, ultimately blending into the Vietnamese culture and fathering a child, Lin, by Ma, a village girl. In the meantime, Ruth gives birth to their son, Marco Polo, who is said to have the same mystical whaling powers of Thomas's grandfather. Years later, following Thomas's return, Dwight, a ne'er-do-well friend of Thomas's, arranges for the tribe to kill a whale and to sell the meat to the Japanese, a plan that will draw in Marco Polo and set up a confrontation between the whole ensemble. Despite the plot's multiple strands, the story flows smoothly, and Hogan comes up with a powerful, romantic crescendo. (Aug.)
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Schooled
by Anisha Lakhani
Published 2008 by Hyperion Books
Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9781401322878
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Jacket Notes:
In the tradition of "The Nanny Diaries" comes this vibrant debut novel about a young teacher in an elite private school who walks into a windfall--and a world she never could have imagined--when she becomes a homework tutor to the children of New York's super-rich.
REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 05/12/2008
Lakhani paints a darkly comic picture of what a five-figure tuition bill really gets you at an elite Manhattan private school. The former Dalton English teacher knows the territory, and it is bleak. Here's Anna, a newbie teacher with Ivy credentials whose passion for the low-paying teaching profession is cause for celebration at the upper-crust Langdon school, where as the exotic-looking newcomer, she is mistakenly identified as a coveted minority hire. With low pay and even lower expectations from teachers and parents, Anna realizes there's no way she can survive-until she learns about lucrative after-school tutoring gigs. And just like that, Anna's ideals go out the window. In a hilarious out-of-control spiral into obsession with all-things designer, expensive and showy, Anna transforms into someone who believes money can buy everything and everyone. There is redemption, of course, in the form of a teacher who bucks the system, and Anna discovers some of her students are pretty wonderful. The realization comes rather abruptly, and the happy ending is a bit pat, but the romp through an unsettling, soulless world of adults and children who'd rather coast through life than live it provides plenty of laughs. (Aug.)
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