Bright-eyed, independent Emma Gant arrives in Miami in the summer of 1959 with the world at her feet. She has a married lover who'll show her the ropes, and a reasonably-priced residence orchestrated by a family friend, and an upwardly-mobile job at the Miami Star, the most important accessory for a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill journalism school.Emma joins the Star's reporting staff at a tumultuous time, shortly after Fidel Castro enacted his First Agrarian Reform. Living in a hotel run by Cuban émigrés for Cuban émigrés makes the upheavals of Castro’s revolución more than just news to Emma. Placing her in this context, the author seems to be drawing a comparison between Emma’s situation and that of the Cubans. As Emma is struggling to figure out her place in the world and gauge her future success, so are her newly exiled neighbors.
The more one reads into the life history of the author, the more Queen of the Underworld begins to seem like a semi-autobiographical novel. Godwin herself graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1959 and spent a year on the staff of the Miami Herald before embarking on the world travels that sparked her literary career.
What is most curious about the novel is that it takes place over such a short period of time. The story of Emma's coming into her own, Queen of the Underworld is a window into what seems to be a key moment in Emma’s development, one that may affect her entire career. Godwin, however, manages to squeeze an unbelievable amount of action into less than two weeks. Emma's life during the span of the novel is so full, it is almost surreal; as she herself recounts, “in one week and three days, I met a gangster walking a dog, sat behind a notorious boss at a funeral, became friends with [an] ex-madame […], and helped two Cubans smuggle arms out of Florida” (331), and that’s not even the half of it.
By contrast, the novel’s ending is unsatisfying and somewhat abrupt. While Emma fantasizes about writing a novel, there is nothing (besides Godwin's own history) that gives any indication that Emma will become a novelist. The narrative ends with both Emma and the reader waiting on her future, filled with unanswered questions.
Godwin’s characterization, however, is the novel’s saving grace. Emma is amazingly sympathetic despite her naïveté and the fact that she seems to have no compunction about sleeping with another woman's husband (although her sexual relationships do seem to be at odds with her history of sexual abuse). More significantly, Queen of the Underworld is full of finely drawn secondary characters. One such character is Don Waldo Navarro, a prominent academic who fled Cuba with his memoirs sewn into his wife’s skirt. A minor character, who could have easily been shunted aside after his grand entrance, Don Waldo is made real in Godwin’s attention to detail: he swims breaststroke in the hotel pool “in billowing maroon trunks” (260) with “his leonine head erect” (259) and has the ability of seamlessly incorporating a nine-year-old Spanish-speaking girl into a English-language conversation: “the great educator’s consecutive translations into Spanish on Luisa’s behalf bore no trace of pedagogy. Don Waldo made it seem merely as though he suddenly chose to complete the rest of his discourse in another tongue” (272).
Read my full review at Front Street Reviews...
I first read 
Deborah Rodriguez, known by Kabul shop owners and Michigan prison inmates alike as “Miss Debbie,” first came to Afghanistan in 2002 as part of a group from the Care for All Foundation, a Christian Humanitarian Organization. A hairdresser by trade, Rodriguez is deemed significantly less useful than her medically-trained compatriots and is given any number of odd jobs and a good deal of free time to explore the city. Little did she--or the relief group--realize exactly how desirable her skills might be in that war-torn city. 
Ahdaf Soueif's first fiction offering since 
The whole of Bayern is ill at ease when its king and queen decide to send a delegation to Tira, a rival nation that attempted to conquer Bayern the previous year. The losses incurred in that campaign’s final battle, most as the result of a Bayern fire speaker, have only fueled tensions between the two countries. No place is more dangerous for Bayerns to travel than the Tiran capital Ingridan, but King Geric and Queen Isi are convinced that a diplomatic mission is necessary to avert further conflicts. 
Yesterday my friend 
Jane Howe is a thirty-seven-year-old single woman living in New York City. She has what some would call a perfect life: a satisfying and well-paying job, a great apartment in Greenwich Village, good friends, and family close enough to visit, but not close enough to be involved in her daily life. 
Set on the steppes of western Asia six thousand years ago, Wind Rider is a multifaceted tale of one girl’s coming of age interwoven with a narrative about the first domestication of horses by the Botai people of modern-day Kazakhstan.
53-year-old Calamity Lambkin's life seems to be coming loose at the seams. Beginning "the change of life" and grappling with the loss of the father that she nursed for the past two years, she is amazed when pieces of her past begin to materialize out of thin air. With the onset of menopause, Calamity seems to have reawakened the "finding" gift she had as a youth. Only now, the lost items come to her – everything from her favorite stuffed animal, which literally falls from the sky landing on her head, to her father’s cashew grove, which appears one evening in the yard of her new home. 
Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime?
I was planning to end the week featuring 
Song Shan is only twelve years-old when a disaster tears apart her family, destroying everything she holds dear. She flees her Chinese homeland entrusted with a small jade tiger and the legacy of a secret society of female fighters. The tiger is just one piece of the mystical Jade Circle that has been at the heart of her family for almost fifteen hundred years.
Teresa Rae Wood is a firecracker. After escaping an abusive marriage she comes into her own. The host of her own radio show, Modern Pioneers!, Teresa lives an idyllic life in small-town Minnesota with common-law husband Bruce and her two children: 17-year-old Josh and 20-year-old Claire. When, out of the blue, Teresa is diagnosed with terminal cancer, the family's whole world changes. Within months Teresa is dead. Reeling from the shock, Bruce, Claire, and Josh falter; the family comes apart at the seams.
Fitting for a rabbi who has authored over a dozen books on Jewish mysticism and spirituality, Kushner's first work of fiction is an allegorical novel centered around Jewish mysticism.
In 1909, after being invited to give a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, Sigmund Freud made his first and only visit to the United States accompanied by then-disciple Carl Jung as well as the less well-known psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi. The visit prompted Freud to call America "a gigantic mistake" and all Americans "savages." He also blamed the trip for many physical ailments some of which predated the visit; no one is exactly sure why. The exploration of that question is the premise of law professor and first-time novelist Jed Rubenfeld's historical thriller 
Growing up in a violence-ridden housing project, sixteen-year-old Hector Robles kept his head to the ground. A studious boy, he was the last person anyone would expect to end up on the wrong side of a feud with the local gang. However, when his impulsive older bother sets his sights on Gloria, the neighborhood knockout and on-again, off-again girlfriend of Chava, leader of the Discípulos, that’s exactly what happens.
Edinburgh is abuzz with the annual Fringe Festival, packed to the gills with tourists taking in the festival fare. When a road rage incident leaves one visitor to the city hospitalized, a complex net of mystery and intrigue begins to envelop everyone who witnessed the attack.
When nine-year-old Aurelia Bernard takes shelter in Kyoto's beautiful and mysterious Baishian teahouse after a fire one night in 1866, she is unaware of the building's purpose. She has just fled the only family she's ever known: after her French immigrant mother died of cholera in New York, her abusive missionary uncle brought her along on his assignment to Christianize Japan. She finds in Baishian a place that will open up entirely new worlds to her--and bring her a new family.
The mesmerizing chronicle of three tenth-century Viking women whose lives are inextricably bound by fate...
Set in 1865 Boston, the plot of 
Set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, 
This is another small book that packs a punch. Set on Martha Vineyard, 
Synopsis:
Written for the teen/tween set, the book is light-hearted and will appeal to anyone in the mood for a sweet book with a happy ending. Protagonist Sam is a sympathetic character, a spunky social outsider with a good sense of humor and a crush on a guy who she can never hope to get. The story, outside of the romantic bumbling, does have a message. The only thing that I didn't particularly like were the lists, but they are Cabot's MO in this novel and serve both as summaries and as a way to add Sam's voice to the narrative.
I've been listening to this book in the car for quite some time and I finally finished it yesterday. While I appreciated how moody and episodic it was, I did get irritated with it occasionally.
A collection of seven stories set in Thailand from a young (my age) American author.
I thought it was a good read, long but thoroughly engrossing. Though the ending is a bit unrealistic; everything is tied up too well. I think it is probably more of a historical romance than a work of realistic fiction.
J.A. Konrath's debut novel and the first in a promising series (the Jack Daniels mysteries).
In the lush redwood country of Humboldt, California, a man and a woman seek shelter from their pasts. He is an ex-L.A. cop whose life was torn apart by guilt and betrayal. She is a woman haunted by a savage attack she never should have survived. Althea Auben is a struggling single mother, holding together the ragged pieces of her life for the sake of her thirteen-year-old son. She lives in the shadow of her past, carrying the scars from the terrible night that left her brutalized, comatose, and pregnant. But David has started to rebel. He no longer believes his mother's lies about his own history. Desperate for a man in his life, he befriends Jack Verrity, who seeks privacy almost as much as Althea. Then, without warning, David disappears. Battling her paralyzing fears, Althea takes off in pursuit of her vanished son. Jack, feeling long-dormant emotions stir, begins a search of his own. It is a journey that will thrust them into a world of privilege and exclusion on Long Island's Gold Coast - and plunge Althea into the fresh terror of a long-ago summer night...