News of the World

News of the World by Paulette Jiles

This book takes its title from the occupation of the main character, Cpt. Kidd, an army veteran in post-

Civil War Texas who rides from town to town charging auditoriums full of people a dime to hear him read news from far-flung places, made possible only recently by the advent of the telegraph. I'm fairly certain that the profession was real, and it was something I hadn't heard of before. Kidd's humdrum existence is upended when, at one reading, a friend passes off to him a little white girl who had been kidnapped four years earlier by the Kiowa; his mission becomes to return the girl to her aunt and uncle in a little town near San Antonio. Adventure ensues! So too does compassion and empathy as the old man -- Kidd is in his 70s -- works to help the young girl, Johanna, adjust to white society in the kindest way possible.

This was certainly an interesting, captivating read. But the ending -- oh, the ending! This is the second book in a row in which the ending was just too tidy, too happy, too redemptive. Do things really work out like this in real life? Is sorrow and disappointment not a part of the human condition? It was strange to hear the book's tone change so radically near the end. I wish it had ended more abruptly many pages earlier.

The Burgess Boys

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

Two lawyer brothers thought they had left their Maine childhood behind, when one day they receive a call from the sister they left behind. The news isn't good: her son, their nephew, had thrown a pig's head through a mosque frequented by their hometown's burgeoning Somali refugee population. As a result, the brothers must go back home and, in doing so, confront long-buried -- and misunderstood -- truths of their childhood.

I'm a sucker for this kind of realistic fiction. Strout lets you intimately know the characters in this book, particularly the younger Burgess boy, Bob. But I think what drew me in even more was the relevance of the subject matter. Some Maine towns are, indeed, reeling from an influx of refugees, and the different culture from which they came. It's an issue that the whole country is now dealing with as a result of the current crisis in Syria (not to mention Yemen, Sudan, Myanmar, etc. etc.) The ending might have been a bit too tidy for me, but this book nevertheless had me reading long past my bedtime.

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