Hardened by a childhood of abuse and abandonment, cynical foreign correspondent Adam Watkins comes to believe that man's biggest weakness is "the need to connect." But when he reads about the murder of his snake-handling preacher father, Little Sam Jenkins, he returns to Appalachia after 20 years, determined to unlock Little Sam's secrets. In the process he falls for the woman who may have killed his father.
Nahai's dreamlike story (set in the '70s) beguiles with its depiction of a world where worshippers drink strychnine to prove their faith. Home, we learn, still casts a powerful spell. (Harcourt, $24)
Bottom Line: Haunting Tennessee love story
The Story of the WWI Christmas Truce
By Stanley Weintraub
In December 1914 German and British soldiers were staring each other down across a moonscape of barbed wire and bloated corpses. Then a soccer game broke out.
Many soccer games, actually. All was quiet on the Western front for a few days around Christmas. Jeering across the trenches—many Germans spoke English—led to Christmas carols, then a cease-fire so both sides could bury their dead. Later, enemies began sharing toasts, swapping beer for plum pudding and kicking a ball around.
Historian Weintraub, piecing together accounts from letters, says nothing like it had happened before. His is a moving story of horror taking a holiday. (Free Press, $25)
Bottom Line: Humanity in no-man's-land
By John Grisham
In Grisham's 1991 blockbuster The Firm, the hero (played by Tom Cruise in the '93 film) and his wife fought to escape the talons of a sinister law firm. In Grisham's latest the protagonists do battle with another vast and powerful conspiracy: the spirit of Christmas today.
Luther and Nora Krank's neighbors aggressively celebrate yuletide every year (right down to identical plastic Frostys for every rooftop), but the Kranks (get it?) want out. No cards. No tree. Especially no Frosty. On Hemlock Street, however, the neighbors mind their own and everybody else's business, making the Kranks instant pariahs.
That element makes Grisham's fable harder to swallow than last year's fruitcake. People opt out of seasonal celebrations for a multitude of reasons and no one raises an eyebrow. So why are the neighbors so obsessed with the Kranks' Christmas plans? Before the inevitable Grinch-Scrooge moral kicks in, Luther comes across as a well-drawn mess of ill temper and petty crabbiness. He wants to forsake a shrink-wrapped, credit-card-driven Christmas. Maybe he's onto something. (Doubleday, $19.95)
Bottom Line: Bah, humbug!
By Anita Diamant
In her first novel, 1997's 2-million-selling The Red Tent, Anita Diamant created a biblical world so rich in detail that readers could almost smell the goat stew simmering in clay pots. Such well-researched pungency is notably absent from Good Harbor, a slight, superficial read that will have Tent's rabid fans pulling up stakes. Trading the complex women from the Book of Genesis (Tent's heroines) for the navel-gazing guests of daytime-TV talk shows, Diamant again seeks to explore female bonding and the lies that women tell in order to stay afloat. But Good Harbor's characters—42-year-old Joyce, a frustrated romance writer unhappy with her marriage, and 59-year-old Kathleen, an emotionally detached librarian fighting breast cancer—lack the depth that made The Red Tent such a phenomenon. What's more, Diamant's dialogue aims for girl-talk intimacy but manages only to be dull: "Mothers and daughters, huh? It's never easy," says Joyce. "Mothers and sons are complicated too," responds Kathleen. At another point Joyce laments about herself: "Bored suburban housewife. Empty-nest cliché. Oh, God, this is so awful." Too bad she's right. (Scribner, $25)
Bottom Line: Shallow water
By Ken Follett
Page-turner of the week
Returning to the World War II setting of his bestselling thrillers Eye of the Needle and The Key to Rebecca, Follett once again strikes Nazi pay dirt. This time out his heroine is Felicity Clairet—known as Flick—a secret agent for the British organization Special Operations Executive who is working with members of the Resistance in occupied France. As the clock ticks down to the Allied invasion, Flick must pull together an all-woman team, code-named Jackdaws, to blow up a key Nazi telephone exchange. Her group is ragtag—a tomboy aristocrat, a safe-cracker, a murderer—and the mission dangerous. Making things even more complicated is the married Flick's growing attraction to the handsome American major overseeing the operation.
Follett's love scenes feel clunky; thankfully, he spends more time in battle than in the bedroom. In his action scenes the story speeds along at breakneck pace. Giving the plot added heft is the author's note that the book is inspired by a true story (he says that during World War II, Britain's SOE sent 50 women into France as secret agents; 36 survived). And coming as it does amid a new war, the book's celebration of uncommon courage and unlikely heroes couldn't be better timed. (Dutton, $26.95)
Bottom Line: A distaff Dirty Dozen
The 40-Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones
By Stephen Davis
In early-'60s London a shaggy-maned singer changes his name from Mike Jagger to the tougher-sounding Mick, while a scrawny lad named Keith Richards turned on to Chuck Berry. A force of nature was born. Davis, known for his lurid 1985 Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods, leaves no Stone unburned in this tour through four decades of drugs, adultery and even suspicious death. The familiar details range from petty to disturbing: Former bassist Bill Wyman and Richards didn't speak for 11 years; Jagger once sent John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas on an errand, then locked the door while he had sex with Phillips's 18-year-old daughter, TV star Mackenzie; Frank Thorogood, an employee of Brian Jones's, allegedly confessed on his deathbed in 1993 to intentionally drowning the guitarist, whose 1969 death was thought to be an accident. Written in a hip, staccato style, Old Gods glories in the chaos of rock before it became festooned with corporate logos. The Stones didn't invent debauchery, but they mastered it. (Broadway, $27.50)
Bottom Line: Satisfaction guaranteed
By Nick Bantock
Part love story and part puzzle, the Griffin & Sabine epistolary trilogy—about pen pals falling in love—was a fable (the last volume came out in 1993) that enchanted readers, with 3 million books sold. Now Bantock continues the G&S tale with The Gryphon, the first installment of a new trilogy. Like the earlier books, this one comes with hands-on visual aids—handwritten notes that can be pulled from attached envelopes and stylized faux-ancient maps. If only the tale were such fun.
Like its predecessor, The Gryphon is a love story told through correspondence, but Bantock is often too cryptic as he creates fictional worlds within worlds. Matthew, an archeologist digging in Egypt, and his girlfriend Isabella, a student in Paris, get letters from Griffin and Sabine, not knowing whether the writers are real or imaginary.
Bantock again mixes Eastern myths and psychological games to make points about trust and cosmic harmony. The story is an impressively constructed labyrinth, but many readers will be looking not for answers but for the quick way out. (Chronicle, $19.95)
Bottom Line: Hot-air mail
- Contributors:
- Lan N. Nguyen,
- Kyle Smith,
- Mike Neill,
- Michelle Tauber,
- Cynthia Sanz,
- Alec Foege,
- V.R. Peterson.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
