Karen

I enjoyed this mystery/thriller that started out with a murdered Swedish real estate agent/wife/mother and gradually led to the discovery of an international conspiracy involving the leadership of an almost-post-apartheid South Africa. I don't read a lot of mysteries, and I haven't read Henning Mankell before. I liked how the process of investigation was portrayed, in particular how small discoveries led to larger ones, or how coincidences led to failures to find or transmit information.

I can see myself reading another one of these sometime in the future!

A beautifully crafted story of the friendship between two young working class girls in 1950's Naples, Italy. The story is told from the perspective of Elena, the girl who is able to go to high school, and follows the progress of their lives and friendship as they grow from little girls to young women. In the process, we also get to know the inhabitants of the neighborhood where they live–their parents, their neighbors, the grocers, teachers, barkeepers, bakers and mechanics. We also get glimpses of the dark stories that the adults have from “before”–before the girls were born. Who was a Fascist, who is a Communist, where some people get the money that finances their business, who has a financial hold over whom in the neighborhood–all these things are undercurrents in the story that occasionally surface to disturb us. The depiction of the girls' friendship is anything but sentimental (it's not an easy friendship) but as a whole it's very moving. When I finished the book I was in awe. Also, I was on fire to get the next book (this is the first of a trilogy) to see how the story continues.

This is a really great teen novel, told from multiple perspectives, about the shooting of a young black man by a white man and the aftermath for the community where the shooting took place. On the face of it, it's a simple story told through the experiences of the people affected by the shooting. The author does a beautiful job of showing how the effects of the shooting ripple out from the immediate community to touch people surprisingly far away, and she creates voices for her characters that feel authentic, however likable or unlikable they may be. The result is a deep and painfully human story that doesn't offer any easy answers for the problems it depicts, but offers hope in the resilience of some of its characters.

This book was chosen for the Saint Paul Public Library's 2015 Read Brave program, a community reading/teen reading program. The Luther Seminary Book Club read and discussed it in January, and some of the participants expressed interest in attending author events in February.

This was a gripping story right up to the end. The main character, Pete Snow, is a likeable social worker with a huge district in Montana and a lot of personal problems. He becomes involved with a reclusive millennialist through trying to help the man's young son, who shows up in town malnourished and inadequately clothed one day. The main reason I didn't give this book a higher rating is that the story of the millennialist and Pete's personal problems get such big build ups that the ending feels abrupt and completely anticlimactic. Still, the setting of Montana in the late 70's/early 80's, the drinking habits and personal foibles of many of the characters, the impossible burden of keeping sane while taking care of kids in terrible circumstances, the paranoia of the federal government at the time of President Reagan's shooting–it all combines to make a really great read.

Say Nothing starts out with the disappearance of Jean McConville, a 38 year old widow and mother of 10, who was dragged from her home in Belfast by a group of masked men and women in 1972 and never seen by her family again. But in order to tell the story of what happened to Jean McConville and her children, it's necessary to tell the story of the IRA, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and the British Army in Belfast in the 20th century. So, after giving us the mystery of McConville's disappearance and the terrible plight of her children, Patrick Radden Keefe spends the bulk of the next 200 pages writing about the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the individuals who played important roles in the Provisional IRA through the 1970's and all the way up to the Good Friday Accord. This was not what I expected, but it was riveting, so I happily went along for the ride. Of course, the story does make its way back to Jean McConville, and other people who were “disappeared” during the Troubles.

As an American who knew about the Troubles growing up and romanticized the IRA, especially as a teenager, I appreciated how Keefe acknowledges that there was a sort of glamour associated with IRA fighters. His book shows clearly, though, how very brutal and unglamorous the conflict was, and many of the people in it as well. The present is equally complex. There is peace, but survivors are traumatized, the past has not been fully dealt with, and as more than one person in the book says, the IRA has not gone away.

Say Nothing has 65 pages of notes, a bibliography, and index. It is well researched and reads like a great piece of longform journalism, which it is.