"The Yellow Birds" by Kevin Powers ****

• National Book Award Finalist
• US author
• Originally published 2012
• Epigraphs:
• "A yellow bird, With a yellow bill, Was perched upon, My windowsill..........I lured him in, With a piece of bread, And then I smashed, His fucking head....."....Traditional U.S. Army Marching Cadence
• "To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetfull of evils past, is a mercifull provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil dayes, and our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions.".....Sir Thomas Browne
• Quotes:
• p.11...."We only pay attention to rare things, and death was not rare."
• p.24....."It was hard to believe that we'd be OK and that we'd fought well.  But I remember being told that the truth does not depend on being believed."
• p.31..."At some point along the way I stopped believing in significance.  Order became an accident of observation."
• p.33...."He was harsh, but fair, and there was a kind of evolutionary beauty in his competence."....Sergeant Sterling
• p.35...."Eventually I had to learn that freedom is not the same thing as the absence of accountability."
• p.37....."We'd had small lives, populated by a longing for something more substantial than dirt roads and small dreams.  So we'd come here, where life needed no elaboration and others would tell us who to be."
• p.91....."I thought of my grandfather's war.  How they had destinations and purpose."...in contrast to his war
• p.93....."It's like a car accident.  You know?  That instant between knowing that it's gonna happen and actually slamming into the other car.  Feels pretty helpless actually, like you've been riding along same as always, then it's there staring you in the face and you don't have the power to do shit about it.  And know it.  Death, or whatever, it's either coming or it's not."......the sensation when moving into battle
• p.99....."Such small arrangements make a life, and though it's hard to get close to saying what the heart is, it must at least be that which rushes to spill out of those parentheses which were the beginning and the end of my war.....".
• p.100...."...if God had looked on us during that flight back home we might have seemed like fabric ready to be thrown, in surrendered blankness of our sleep, over the furniture of a thousand empty houses."......so very sad
• p.115...."It all seemed in that moment to be the conclusion of a poorly designed experiment in inevitability."..........the moment before engaging the enemy to fight over a patch of land which was fought over almost annually
• p.165....."He wanted to have one memory he'd made of his own volition to balance out the shattered remnants of everything he hadn't asked for."......Murph watching the pretty medic at work, grieving, and then in death
• p.225....."It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said.  It wasn't much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow."...after conversation between Bartle and Murph's mother at the prison
• Notes:
• the story of Murph's father bringing home canaries from the mine to set them free, and then they returned at night to their cage........foreshadowing, metaphor of a mournful life

• Review:  One of the epigraphs for this book seems to summarize it best with the metaphor of an innocent yellow bird being brutally destroyed by a human.  Certainly, Murph, experienced the same before he died, a death chosen rather than survival.  Yet perhaps the worse destruction is experienced by his surviving buddy, Bartle.  It did not surprise me to read that the author, Kevin Powers, was a Michener Fellow in Poetry in graduate school.  Powers' prose is absolutely beautiful, creating a stark contrast with the anything but beautiful plot.  This novel is heartrending! A very impressive debut.  In many ways this book earns five stars by my criteria.  The use of language and characters are stellar.  However, there is something about the rhythm of the story that fell a bit short.  So, 4 stars, and a desire to see more from this author in the future.

"The Housekeeper and the Professor" by Yoko Ogawa ****

• Summer Sub Club with Beth
• Originally published in 2003
• Japanese author
• Characters:  no names.....the housekeeper, the professor, and her son, nicknamed Root by the professor, because his flat head looked like the symbol for square root
• Set in Japan, 1990s
• Quotes:
• p.7..."Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world.  They were a safe, a source of comfort."
• p.19..."With my finger I traced the trail of numbers from the ones the Professor had written to the ones I'd added, and they all seemed to flow together, as if we'd been connecting up the constellations in the night sky."
• p.43....I uncovered propositions that existed out there long before we were born.  It's like copying truths from God's notebook, though we aren't always sure where to find this notebook or when it will be open."
• p.62....."To me, the appeal of prime numbers had something to do with the fact that you could never predict when one would appear."....not unlike a deep connection to another person
• p.100....."Math has proven the existence of God, because it is absolute and without contradiction; but the devil must exist as well, because we cannot prove it."
• p.116....."Eternal truths are ultimately invisible, and you won't find them in material things or natural phenomena, or even in human emotions.  Mathematics, however, can illuminate them, can give them expression--in fact, nothing can prevent it from doing so."
• p.124...."In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that even the faintest light would shine through it.  The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze.  You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek.  And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make even the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to earth."
• p.130...."He treated Root exactly as he treated prime numbers.  For him, primes were the base on which all other natural numbers relied; and children were the foundation of everything worthwhile in the adult world."
• p.140...."So you think that zero was there waiting for us when humans came into being, like the flowers and the stars? You should have more respect for human progress.  We made the zero, through great pain and struggle."
• p.141...."Someone had to overcome this reasonable assumption, someone had to figure out how to express nothing as a number.  This unknown man from India made nonexistence exist.  Extraordinary, don't you think?"....mind boggling actually

• Review:  I thought this book was an elegant gem of a read.  The touching story of the relationship between a housekeeper, a professor whose short-term memory lasts only 80 minutes, and the housekeeper's son.  The relationship is both unique, simple, and profound.  The interweaving of mathematical theory and relationship was deceptively simple.  I think Ogawa has created a theorem for both eternal connection and divine order. I smiled the entire time I was reading it.  Just lovely!  

"Navidad & Matanza" by Carlos Labbe **

• Open Letter Series
• Chilean author
• Originally published in 2014
• Review:   Well....I am all in favor of experimental formats, stream of consciousness narration, and other non-traditional formats, however, this novel failed to engage me at all.  It is the first Open Letter Publication that I just did not like.  Oh well!  

"Elsewhere" edited by Eliot Weinberger *****

• Poetry
• Japan, Haiti, Portugal, Senegal, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Turkey, Nicaragua, Austria, France, Spain
• Originally published by Open Letter in 2014
• Review:  Fantastic!  A book of poetry by poets from around the world, all of which are written about being "elsewhere".  Poems about Paris by a Chilean, a Japanese, and an Andean.  Better yet, each poem is followed by a brief biographical note about the poet and if he was affiliated with a particular school of poetry.  Only question....why no women?  Other than the gender issue, this collection is a gem!!

"The Testing of Luther Albright" by MacKenzie Bezos

• Audio book
• Originally published 2005
  
• US author

●  Review:  I think the best way to describe this novel is as a series of tests. Stability tests are run on dams after earthquakes. Just so are parents tested as children become adolescents and young adults. Just so are couples tested as they change over time. Tremors and after shocks test the stability of relationships. In this story, Luther Albright tries to fit his emotional world into his engineer's orderly framework. Frankly, the reader's patience is tested a bit too by Luther's/the author's pedantic process.

"The Transcriptionist" by Amy Rowland. *****

• Review:  Fabulous debut novel! Witty, dark, existential.....these are the first adjectives which come to mind after reading this book straight through. I could not put it down! The terror of alienation strikes the soul of a young woman as she tries to find a self in a world full of horrifying news. The characters are engaging, the plot is unique, and the author's use of language is memorable! Well done!
• Publication scheduled for 2014
• US author
• Early Reviewer edition

"My Own Miraculous" by Joshilyn Jackson ****

• Audiobook
• Novella
• US author
• Originally published in 2013
• Review:  What a charming novella!  This is, pure and simple, about maturing into adulthood, parenthood, and love.  Simply told, and well done!