The Postmistress
Maureen Best

The Postmistress

by Sarah Blake

Life, Death, War, Love, Choice- especially choice: it governs our lives even when it's not conscious, just instinctive. A wonderful book! read it!

Extras

Paul Westerfeld

Scott Westerfeld’s Extras is a good addition to the original ‘Uglies’ trilogy.

The series is an interesting interpretation of a post-apocalyptic world. While the Extras may seem particularly far-fetched the author’s focus on modern popular Japanese society mixed with a Hollywood star mentality leaves the reader wondering if society is really so far away from that world.

While stressing the ideas of individuality & thinking for oneself, Westerfeld delivers a wonderfully addictive fast-paced, coming of age science fiction novel.

Reviewed by Kirsten Hofbauer

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

By: Michael Chabon

Patrick J. Cosgrove

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a fitting title because it captures the turbulence bound in the life-stories of two Jewish cousins during the 1930’s through to the 1950’s. Michael Chabon conveys a sense of breathlessness, if not suffocation, that accompanies the era’s vanishing naiveté as not only within the lives of the protagonists, but as more generally indicative of a shift in America’s changing self perception amidst reshaping world relations.

After a fortuitous escape from the Nazi occupied city of Prague, Josef Kavalier unites with his cousin Samuel Clay in New York. Once in America Joe is determined to earn enough money to buy his family passage from what was then Czechoslovakia and Sam has an idea of how to make this dream a reality: comic books. As Sam and Joe make their way into the comic book industry, they help to expose the reserved imagination and curiosity of mindset still recovering from the Great Depression. While the cousins’ ideas are met with reluctance behind closed doors, the revenue that their comic books recoup far outweighs any questions of impropriety.

Although The Amazing Adventures can be read as exposé, a rendition of art imitating life, a commentary on American society and socio-political impulses reacting against Nazism (and then Communism, homosexuality, or any such “other”), or a record of emerging American corporatism, Chabon’s characters and their stories are far too compelling to let anything stand in the way of the very real, very personal, and very particular human emotions that are at stake. On the one hand there is guilt and regret, estrangement and loss, strife and struggle; however, there is also compassion and love, hope and salvation, unity and healing. Indeed, within the lives of comic superheroes’ unflinching exterior lies “the odd impulse to conceal their true natures in the guise of far weaker and more fallible beings.”

Michael Chabon’s prose is tight and provides interesting historical and cultural insights. The descriptive passages are clean and create a many memorable scenes. And, without creating caricatures, the dialogue is colloquial and cuts characters of a unique cloth. As the plot stretches across cultures and bridges generations we see the effects of prejudice and reprisal. Truly, besides being a riveting story and a thoroughly entertaining read, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay will definitely leave you with something to think about.

Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. New York: Picador, 2000.

ISBN#: 9780312282998

Price: $17.00