Texas Pages

Keith Donohue wrote one of my favorite books in the last few years, 2006's The Stolen Child, in which he did a better job than any contemporary writer I've come across in conveying to adult readers the inner lives of children. Even for someone who has children and presumably knows a little about how they think, this book was a revelation, both joyous and terrifying.

He pulls off that neat trick again, even better, with Angels of Destruction, which came out in March. In this one, a lonely middle-aged woman is surprised one cold, windy evening to find a young girl on her doorstep, the enigmatic and beautiful Norah. Margaret Quinn is still missing her own daughter, who ran off as a teenager to join a radical student group. Margaret takes Norah in, and they concoct a story that she's Norah's grandmother. Norah makes a friend named Sean who begins to suspect that Norah's not really a child ... she's an angel. She performs wonderful feats that could be explained by simple trickery, but they somehow go beyond that. She enchants the other schoolchildren; they stop bickering in her presence. But Norah's persnickety, and she loses her temper sometimes. Sean wonders: "How could she be an angel? She had no wings, no halo. Angels do not bite." And there's a dark figure lurking in the shadows: Is it Lucifer, the original fallen angel, trying to recruit?

As the story progresses, moving from small-town Pennsylvania to small-town New Mexico, Donohue weaves a thoroughly believable, mystical and yet startlingly realistic portrait of the Quinn family and its small interloper. This is inventive, provocative fiction at its absolute best.

I've been meaning to read Charles Baxter's latest book, The Soul Thief, since it came out on Feb. 12 ... of 2008. That should tell you how tall my "to be read" stack is; it's actually threatening to topple over and kill several potted plants even as we speak. Or possibly the schnauzer.

Anyway, the book came out Feb. 10 this year in paperback, and that reminded me to go read my hardcover that's been sitting around for a year. Too bad I waited; it's a doozy, one of those books that you better start reading early in the evening or it'll keep you up all night.

It starts out in 1970s Buffalo, where a grad student becomes enthralled with an outsider named Coolberg. Nathaniel's affection ... well, cools, when he finds out that Coolberg is literally trying to become Nathaniel, stealing clothes and other items and claiming that incidents in Nathaniel's life actually happened to him. Something nasty happens, and Coolberg exits, only to reappear decades later. Creepy stuff -- not the least of which is that we don't know who's actually narrating the first-person novel.

Perhaps because I just finished re-reading Joan Didion's remarkable The Year of Magical Thinking, this memoir by writer Susan Sontag's son had to work doubly hard to keep my attention. I got through it, but only because it's a mere 179 pages. Reiff is not talking about grief, as Didion was, but the lengthy, horrific approach to grief, as his mother battled terminal cancer. Still, many of the topics touched on are the same. Reiff has the same spare writing style as Didion, but none of her piercing self-awareness or wit, and I was left feeling sad but unenlightened and unchanged.

OK, you caught me. I've been lazy the last couple of weeks, mostly catching up on magazine reading. But I finished a batch of books over the weekend, so you're about to get a few new entries in Joy's List for the year.

Carol O'Connell's Bone by Bone (hardcover, 2008) is one of the best mystery/thrillers I've read lately. I'm not a big fan of her Mallory novels, but this stand-alone is gripping and intriguing. Former Army investigator Oren Hobbs returns to his hometown of Coventry, Calif., to find a mystery on his own doorstep -- literally. It's the skull belonging to his little brother, who disappeared years ago at 15 while on a hiking trip in the woods with Oren. Someone, it seems, is returning Josh to his father's home a little bit at a time.

Coventry has its ... well, let's call them "eccentricities." As one character remarks about the town's ongoing seances, which everyone in town has been to at least once, "Any other town in America would have formed a bowling league."

The only thing missing from this book is more information on Oren, who's an intriguing character that we never really learn much about, past his woman-chasing past. I'm hoping O'Connell writes a sequel and puts him truly at center stage.

Loved Sophie Kinsella's latest book, Remember Me, which is a frothy delight reminiscent of her Shopaholic books (the movie version of the original, Confessions of a Shopaholic, hits theaters on Friday). Remember Me, which came out in paperback last fall, is the tale of a young woman who gets hit on the head and wakes up with amnesia covering the last three years -- during which time she's gotten rid of her "snaggly" teeth, acquired a killer body and hairstyle, and ruthlessly climbed over her former friends to attain her career aspirations. What's more, she's married to a gorgeous guy and lives in a mansion (OK, Mr. Wonderful has some bad points, like obsessive neatness to the point that he freaks if a DVD cover is left on the carpet). Lexi soon find she wasn't all that happy in this fairy-tale existence, though, and the book hilariously follows her as she investigates a very interesting topic: herself. It's froth, but it's well-written froth and you'll drink it up like a latte on a cold day.

I just finished The Host, Stephenie Meyer's first "adult" novel (although you could certainly make a case for the Twilight series going far beyond its originally intended young-adult audience). I have to disagree with Stephen King on this -- I didn't love the Twilight series with as much rabid enthusiasm as some, but I do think Meyer can write. And The Host grabbed me and wouldn't let go -- much like its protagonist, a benign, silvery little creature who, unfortunately for both species, must implant herself in a human to survive.

It reads a little like an updated Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but that's not a bad thing. Meyer has a lot to say about the nature of love, dependence and cooperation, and she says it well.