Caught in a Web – The Dissident by Paul Goldberg

A very hard book to read, and like, in my opinion. Another of my choices to read and rate for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, I had very different expectations, based on the brief synopsis provided by the prize organizers (and the rather deceptive jacket copy). 

Set in 1978, as the Soviet Union was beginning to disintegrate, it is a story about Refuseniks, especially one in particular, Viktor, a Jewish man who is stuck in Moscow, since the government has refused his visa request to emigrate to Israel. Of course, this was a common situation at that time with many Jews seeking to leave for Israel or the United States. I knew a few who managed it, and spent some time getting a taste of their world in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, visiting the shops and restaurants. 

Since it is the Soviet Union, he gets caught up in the impenetrable web of a KGB murder investigation, after he comes upon the scene of the crime, and is seen leaving the site. Viktor's hero is none other than Henry Kissinger, certainly a highly controversial figure on his own, but who is supposed to be arriving for a state visit when the murder, which involved an American, took place. The investigation must be resolved before Kissinger's visit, as it will be a diplomatic issue.

As Winston Churchill said, Soviet Russia is "A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.", and that is certainly true of this novel. Perhaps obtaining a view of that warped world was the author's point, but I just couldn't go along. 

In my Mark Twain reviewer's scoring form, I said that this book did not represent an American voice, but while that's not entirely correct, the form does not provide a lot of space to elaborate. The author is a Russian immigrant who came to the United States as a teenager, so while you could say his is one of many hyphenated American ethnicities writing in the United States today, with the setting of this book in Moscow, it is very far away from what I find to be a relatable tale or an accessible point of view. 

Violence Against Girls and Women – When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McClain

Due to the subject nature (abducted/missing young girls and teens), this was a tough book to get through. There is some violence, a lot of emotional stress and accounts of emotional abuse, and the suspense of the dark plot details. The book is set in 1993, during the search for abducted and murdered Polly Klaas, a young girl from Petaluma, CA.

Anna Hart is a San Francisco detective, specializing in missing persons. After a personal tragedy, unrevealed till much later in the book, her husband insists on a separation. Anna heads to Mendocino, the small California town where she grew up with foster parents Eden and Hap, who were kind and nurturing to her after the very difficult past of her earlier childhood. She finds a small cabin in the woods to rent, and acquires a dog.

Anna becomes embroiled in the search for Cameron, a missing girl, one of a few concurrent cases in Northern California, including the Klaas case, which is receiving a lot of media attention, partly because actress Winona Ryder, who grew up in Petaluma, has taken a personal interest. 

Cameron, the adopted daughter of a former actress and her producer husband, is a beautiful but sad girl who is dealing with early trauma, much of which is unknown to her parents. During Anna's intensive detective work on the case, she uncovers much about Cameron's early childhood, and finds Cameron's protective older brother, Hector, from whom she was separated when she was adopted.

While searching for Cameron, Anna is confronted with her own unresolved, unreconciled personal tragedies, both her current situation, and the earlier ones that haunt her. She becomes reacquainted with Will, the sheriff and an old friend, and Caleb, another, whose twin sister Jenny disappeared during their high school days.

The multiple threads of Cameron's case, and that of another girl named Shannen, and Anna's inner search for resolution with her past coincide and collide throughout this novel, but it never descends into melodrama, as the situations described are all too common, and in the Klaas case, real. 

By the end, nearly all of the tensions and conflicts reach a conclusion, though author Paula McClain does leave one untied thread...which I found both surprising and disappointing.

This subject matter is very disturbing, and since we read and hear about similar cases every day, it's also an important, urgent topic, one that certainly should not be diminished or dismissed by some of our political structures, which seem, in some cases, to care less about the ongoing care and nurturing of children, than than they do about their so-called "pro-life" stance, which ends once birth takes place. Those politicians, who are limiting the rights of women and girls, and who refuse to provide adequate funding to local governments who need help combatting the type of crime addressed in this book, need to be voted out. Please think about that in this very important election year.

 

Murder at the Market – A Sliced Vegetarian by Liesa Malik

A light and cozy murder mystery set in a small town outside of Denver, CO. Daisy Arthur, a 50-something widow, tries to come to the rescue of Brian, a young man with developmental issues, who is accused of a brutal murder the local supermarket where he works. 

Ginny, a similarly challenged young woman, his girlfriend, is a close friend of Daisy, and also works at the market. Her father, Gabe, is the local police lieutenant who also happens to be Daisy's sometime boyfriend. He is very protective of his daughter, and also determined to prove that Brian committed the crime. His anger management issues don't help in his relationships.

Daisy gets herself into a number of compromising and dangerous situations while trying to help solve the murder and get Brian freed.

Of course, all's well that ends well. An entertaining book that is very supportive of individuals with learning disabilities and limitations, a big plus, though it is handled with a bit of a heavy hand.

A Summer of Drama by the Sea – Dreamland by Nancy Bilyeau

New York, 1911: Peggy Battenberg, an independent-thinking twenty-year-old woman and the eventual heiress to a fortune, unwillingly joins her family for a summer sojourn at the exclusive Oriental Hotel, a massive and lavish Victorian-era establishment on Brooklyn's fashionable Manhattan Beach, just down the shoreline from the playground to the masses, Coney Island.

Peggy had been enjoying her volunteer job at a Manhattan bookstore where she met intriguing people who furthered her interests in the arts, social welfare, and politics, but her widowed mother and uncles, who controlled the family money, put a hold on the relative freedom she'd tasted, in order to secure her younger sister's engagement to a man who would expand her family's influence and their holdings in the mining industry out west. As she was still a minor, and had yet to come into any of her inheritance, and because, as a woman, she had no property or other rights, she was compelled to obey her uncles as well as please her mother, who followed strict codes of behavior, dress, and even food and drink choices. Though the Batternbergs were Jewish, they had long left behind such traditions as kosher dining – their food restrictions were more about shunning the tastes of the less well off for such items as Coney Island sausages, which would eventually be known as hot dogs, and the new drink, Coca Cola.

Still, once at the hotel Peggy found opportunities for rebellion: bicycling with her brother as her only chaperone, doctoring her restrictive swimming costume to remove the sleeves and under layers, and eventually making her way to Coney Island, where she is determined to find new adventures, but ends up involved in far more scandalous and sinister activities than she bargained for...but also falls in love with both modern art and and a pioneering artist.

This carefully researched and richly detailed mystery novel is a compelling read, especially for those who are interested in New York and Brooklyn history, the art world as it edges toward modernism, and the societal changes in both Europe and the United States in an age of mass immigration and the sweeping technical and scientific developments in the period preceding World War I.