Welcome To Nowhere

Out Of Syria

People who follow the news, know about the horrific civil war conditions in Syria, the suffering of the people and the huge refugee problem. Elizabeth Laird’s moving novel Welcome To Nowhere, puts it all into perspective for the young—and adult—reader.

She has managed the razor’s edge balance of putting all the horrors of a family’s travaila on the pages, yet not made the book morbid. Through the destruction and displacement, Omar, the twelve-year-old narrator of the story remains upbeat.

Omar lives with his parents, siblings and grandmother in Bosra, Syria, and dreams of being a businessman like the cousin he works for, selling tourist trinkets to visitors. Almost overnight, conditions change in the country. In 2011, violence breaks out – government forces go on the rampage, killing civilians and bombing towns. Omar and his family take a few belongings and flee to stay with relatives in the countryside, where they are relatively safe and comfortable, till the violence reaches there too.

The family packs up again and goes to a refugee camp in Jordan, where, to begin with, conditions are subhuman. They live in tents and Omar has to rush about queuing up for food, water and basic necessities. But the resilience of the Syrians is amazing. Even amidst the deprivation and chaos of the camp, the kids manage to thrive. Omar finds work in a makeshift bazaar, cheekily named Champs Elysees, and supports his family, while his father flounders in rage and helplessness, his clever brother Musa, who suffers from cerebral palsy, needs help, his mother and sisters are forced to stay indoors, since their culture decrees it. Omar may not be as good as his siblings at school, but his courage and resourcefulness endear him to the reader. Every time he is hit by misfortune, he gets up, dusts himself and fights back.

Keeping the young reader in kind, Laird has sanitized the reality of Syria to a large extent—there seems to be a fairy-tale quality to how it ends. There are even touches of humour amidst the tension—when Musa deflects danger by pretending to be retarded. Omar’s family lose their home, and some of them are wounded or killed, but with great empathy, Laird focusses on how a brave and loving family can weather all storms.

Welcome To Nowhere

By Elizabeth Laird

Publishers: Pan MacMillan

Pages: 352

A Great Reckoning

Map of Life

Armand Gamache’s has left behind his demons and lives a quiet life in the hidden village of Three Pines, outside Quebec, with his beloved wife Reine-Marie, when the urge to go back into the police force for a clean-up operation strikes.  Louise Penny’s 12th Chief Inspector Gamache novel, A Great Reckoning, is a leisurely paced novel, but with enough violence and emotional tension to keep the reader hooked.

Gamache’s village is like something out of a dream, with a bunch of friends who look out for one another—including a crabby old woman, Ruth, a poet with a pet duck, whom they all treat with great affection.  Gamache, had retired after a particularly bad shootout, that almost killed him, but he takes up the offer to head the police training academy, because he knows of rampant corruption and uncontrolled violence in the police force and believes the seed is sown early. 

The McGuffin here is an old map that is hidden in the walls of the bistro in Three Pines, which piques Gamache’s curiosity.  To get the hostile cadets of the final year busy, he gives them copies of the map and asks them to solve the mystery hidden in there.  Among the cadets is a troubled young woman, Amelia Choquet (She is described thus: “The rings and studs, like bullets. A girl pierced and pieced together. Like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. Looking for a heart.”) a Chinese girl, a gay boy and a very aggressive cadet, who obviously has an axe to grind with Gamache

When Gamache starts working at the academy, he fires many of the bad teachers, but keeps on the most corrupt Serge Leduc, much to everyone’s surprise; and also brings back a senior, Michel Brébeuf, who had been involved in a major corruption scandal.  Then, Leduc is killed in a very strange manner, and Gamache himself becomes a prime suspect. A copy of the map is found in the dead man’s bedside table, and adds to the mystery of how the killing was carried out with Leduc’s own revolver.

The investigation into the murder goes on, but what makes the book such an enjoyable read is the portrayal of life in Three Pines, so much so, that the warmth of wood fires and aroma of meals served seem to leap off the page.  Then, you come across passages like this : “The flurries had stopped in the night, leaving just a thin layer barely covering the dead autumn leaves. It seemed a netherworld. Neither fall nor winter. The hills that surrounded the village and seemed to guard it from an often hostile world themselves looked hostile. Or, if not actually hostile, at least inhospitable. It was a forest of skeletons. Their branches, gray and bare, were raised as though begging for a mercy they knew would not be granted.”    A Great Reckoning is a book to savour, not race through like any other crime thriller.

A Great Reckoning

By Louise Penny

Published by Minotaur/Hachette.

Pages: 389

Scrappy Little Nobody

Inside Showbiz

           

Some of our film industry folk are writing their autobiographies, but nobody will call their book Scrappy Little Nobody, because their egos would not allow any self deprecation, while Anna Kendrick seems to have not even a little bit of boastfulness in hers, through self-made star like her has a lot to brag about.

Kendrik may be too young to write a memoir, but her book  is a very funny yet insightful look at American show business, which she observes as an outsider, not an entitled star brat. She is bracingly honest, making herself (and her short physique) the target of her sharp wit.

Kendrik started her acting and singing career as a child, on the stage; her parents and brother ferried her to and fro rehearsals and accompanied her to auditions, but from all accounts stayed low-key and normal, not turning into those caricature pushy stage families. If there is any nastiness or exploitation in her experiences from stage to indie film to mainstream, she keeps the gloom off the pages, choosing instead to focus on the lighter side of her work.

 Like any Bollywood struggler, she packs her bags and moves to where the movie industry is in Los Angeles, and after many failed auditions and near broke status, ends up sharing an apartment with two gay men, in which, surprisingly, she continues to live even after reaching a certain degree of success.

Her experiences at shoots of cash-strapped indie films, her first exposure to a film festival and shooting at bizarre place are hilarious. She just never abandons the breezy tone even when she makes observations about the not to pleasant aspects of working in the movies—the red carpet ordeal, giving dozens of generic interviews, dealing with snooty stylists and the problems of carrying off very high heels with designer gowns. She describes how actresses have to avoid sitting till they reach an awards venue to avoid those crotch-level creases on their gowns.

There is Pitch Perfect, the Twilight series and Up In The Air (that got her an Oscar nomination) on her resume, but she still seems a little baffled by her success, even though she clearly worked hard for it, and did not let rejections get her down. There is heartbreak too—a nit-picky boyfriend, like an old-fashioned MCP dumps her because she initiates sex and seems too eager.

Her memories are, of course, selective, but it is obvious that she wanted to have fun writing the book, and maybe there are no demons to exorcise in her mostly happy life. Not everyone is dragged through muck in the cut-throat world of films; it is good to occasionally see it with a sunny-side-up point of view, which Kendrick keeps up, even though the writing is choppy with a bit too much profanity.

At the end, she even creates her own absurd reading group guide, with questions like: “The book opens with the author’s mother wishing for a few stories in which Anna comes across as thoughtful and/or generous. Did Anna’s mother get her wish? Was there a single story where Anna didn’t seem eminently punchable?” or “Anna makes a lot of bad decisions. Can you think of a time when you’ve made a bad decision? Oh wow, really? We’re gonna pretend you can’t think of a single example? YOU THINK YOU’RE BETTER THAN ME?!”

She never seems even remotely punchable; in fact, if the movie offers ever dry up, she has a back-up career as a bestselling author.

Scrappy Little Nobody

By Anna Kendrick

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 304

The Shadow Sister

It’s All In The Stars

The Shadow Sister is the third in Lucinda Riley’s series of novels based on the D’Aplièse sisters, seven of them named after, and loosely inspired by the mythology of the star cluster known as the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters. It’s a thick tome, and for fans of romance and history, an absorbing read.

The sisters were adopted from different parts of the world, by an elusive billionaire they called Pa Salt, and grew up in a fabulous mansion called Atlantis in Geneva. When he died, he left all of them a clue to their past as a legacy. Then it was up to them to hunt for their origins or leave it at that.  An earlier novel, The Storm Sister went from Brazil to Norway. This one travels the distance from Edwardian England to the present in London and the beautiful countryside of Kent, following two very different love stories.

Asterope or Star D’Aplièse is the quiet, bookish one,  manipulated into an uncomfortable togetherness by her fickle sister CeCe, who takes her for granted. Still mourning the death of their father, Star is forced to relocate to a lovely but soulless city apartment by CeCe. She is rescued from boredom by taking a few steps towards finding out about her past, which, according to the clue has something to do with an antiquarian bookshop in London, run by the whimsical Orlando Forbes, who talks her into taking up a job as his assistant. On one occasion, he drags her to his country house, a once grand but now dilapidated High Weald, run by his sullen brother called ‘Mouse’, their cousin Marguerite Vaughan and seven-year-old Rory, who is hearing impaired.

She is somehow connected to them through a woman called Flora MacNichol, whose diaries lead Star to the Lake District in the late 19th century, where the bright and independent girl grew up, with her rather distant parents and sister Aurelia. Her home is close to the cottage of writer Beatrix Potter, who goes on to become an important catalyst in her life.

Star’s Mills & Boon-ish story is interspersed with that of Flora, and the latter is far more interesting. Star finds herself cooking, keeping house and minding Rory, which she likes—preferring to be a domestic creature rather than a career woman. It is no spoiler that the rude guy whom she does not like, will end up the love of her life.

Flora knows that she is not the favoured daughter, when Aurelia is taken to London for her society debut, where, it is hoped she will snare the handsome Archie, or Lord Vaughan.  Archie, however, falls in love with Flora. The families want the Aurelia-Archie match, and so the house is sold to raise a dowry for Aurelia, while Flora is sent to the lavish home of the enigmatic Alice Keppel --famously the mistress of King Edward VII—as a kind of governess to her two daughters.  (Another real-life character making a guest appearance is the headstrong Vita Sackville-West.) 

Keppel transform the shy Flora into an elegant society lady, but her life remains unstable and she is soon evicted from this haven too; her love for her sister makes her sacrifice Archie for her sake. It is clear to the reader that Flora is treated shabbily by her parents for a reason, but what it turns out to be is scandalously gossipy.

Both Star and Flora’s lives and loves have crazy ups and downs, with quite a few twists to be found along the way.  For some reason, Lucinda Riley paints Star as a very old-fashioned young woman, who actually enjoys slaving in the kitchen. Flora, who has fewer choices in a patriarchal society (this was the time when men inherited titles and estates, and could evict their mothers and unmarried sisters on the death of their father), still manages her life with a fearless dignity.

This can be read as a standalone novel, and the books about the other sisters’ quests for their roots will undoubtedly be a mix of historical and modern romance combined with adventure.

The Shadow Sister

By Lucinda Riley

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 704