NEW RELEASES
Chances Are
By Richard Russo, Allen & Unwin, £15.99
Review by Bridie Pritchard
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo’s long-term themes are male friendships, parents and children, love and small-town life.
Chances Are still has all these woven through it, but also at the heart of the story is a mystery about the disappearance of a girl that three friends were all secretly, and not so secretly, in love with.
The three friends meet up together for the first time since a weekend away in Martha’s Vineyard just after they graduated, when Jacy took off, never to be heard from again.
Russo is concerned with fate, fortune and men treating women better.
But we never see Jacy in the round.
It is just through the eyes of the men.
Each chapter is told from the viewpoint of one of them and flashes backwards and forwards in time.
This provides different perspectives on the impact of past events on the present. Just like his characters in Nobody’s Fool and Empire Falls, no one can articulate what they feel to anyone who matters.
But Russo (left) writes them in such a humane way, you can forgive their foibles.
How To Be More Tree
By Annie Davidson, LOM Art, £9.99
Review by Rebecca Wilcock
Part self-help guide, part tree encyclopaedia, part botanical art portfolio, How To Be More
Tree distils 400 million years of trees into 60 “life lessons”.
With a tonguein-cheek tone —
“If something is getting under your bark you (might) just need reminding to enjoy the feeling of the sun on your foliage” — each tree is represented by an illustration and a short story of its superpower.
Annie Davidson’s (above)
illustrations are beautifully drawn, with a mixture of colour and monochrome, but they’re set in so much white space they feel isolated; more like a series of individual botanical art sketches, rather than bringing the stories to life.
The diversity of trees around the world offers up some interesting facts, but the tenuous “life lessons” are often perplexing: “So, like the yew, go slow and feel free to be slightly mysterious.” How To Be More Tree is certainly a celebration of all things tree, but it doesn’t branch out enough to deliver perennial happiness.
In December 2001, I travelled to the
West Bank; there, despite the military incursions, I met some highly educated Palestinian women doing their best to run arts centres, galleries, dance companies and theatres, and hijab-wearing girls from Birzeit University who weren’t in the mood to take nonsense from anyone. This three-generation mini-doorstopper of a novel is not about those sort of Palestinian women, but about the silent, undervalued, dutiful daughters that can be found right across the Arab world.
Set mostly among the Palestinian community in Brooklyn, New York, it tells of the submissive Isra and her struggle to be loved. What she gets, instead, is pregnancies and violence.
It’s a solid effort, full of rich detail, convincing characterisation and genuinely startling reveals. But Rum (left) betrays her inexperience as a novelist in the way she handles some elements of the plot.