Book Review and Book Tour: The Six-Liter Club by Harry Kraus

Thursday 10 June, 2010 By 2 Comments

Title: The Six-Liter Club
Author: Harry Kraus
Publisher: Howard Books
Publication Date: April 6, 2010
Paperback: 364 pages
ISBN: 978-1416577973
Genre: Fiction

Photobucket and 1/2


From the Publisher:

ELUSIVE WHISPERS, A DARK CLOSET, STRONG ARMS… DOES SHE EVEN WANT TO REMEMBER?

Camille Weller has arrived as the first African-American attending in the trauma service of the Medical College of Virginia. Never mind that the locker rooms are labeled “doctors” and “nurses” rather than “men” and “women” or that her dark skin communicates “incapable” to many of her white male colleagues in the OR. Camille has battled prejudices her entire career, but those battles were small spats compared to what she faces now.

When a colleague discovers a lump in her breast, she believes Dr. Camille Weller is the best doctor for her. Together, they decide on a course of treatment that bucks the established medical system, keeping Camille firmly in the crosshairs of male surgeons already riddled with skepticism and suspicion.

Her success as a surgeon is jeopardized further when dark whispers from her childhood in Africa plague Camille’s thoughts. Bewildering panic attacks instill fear in a surgeon bent on maintaining the control, pace, and direction of her own life. Unable to shake the flashes of memory, Camille is forced to face a past she has not acknowledged since the death of her father on an African mission field. Who was he? Who was she? And why would either of those answers affect her present?

My Review:

Mysterious, riveting, and emotionally charged are only a smattering of words to describe The Six-Liter Club by Harry Kraus. Dr. Camille Weller is the first woman to join the Six-Liter Club at the Medical College of Virginia in 1984. She also happens to be the only female doctor in trauma surgery and learns she was hired due to her colour, which angers Camille as she has always viewed herself as a surgeon. After the age of 10 she was raised by her aunt Jeanine, prior to that she lived with her white father and Congolese mother in the Congo. The Six-Liter Club alternates between the struggles Camille is currently facing and flashbacks to the Simba Rebellion of 1964, when she lost both her parents. While The Six-Liter Club is most definitely a medical novel as Kraus takes the reader through the struggles faced by Camille in a world of mainly white men, it is also an intriguing mystery, compelling read, and an all around fascinating novel. Harry Kraus fluidly takes the reader from an operating room in Virginia to the Congo and back again through his writing and his vivid imagery. I found it interesting to see how well he wrote the voice of a young child in the Congo, Kraus clearly has mastered his field. The characters are realistic, some unfortunately so, yet all the same it is quite easy for the reader to get lost in the day to day activities of Camille, a very strong-willed woman, yet one filled with insecurities and discovering at the age of 30 just who she truly is. Kraus delivers a powerful novel that will envelop the reader and will keep the reader turning the pages to find the answers. I would not hesitate to recommend The Six-Liter Club to any reader or discussion group.


About the Author:

Best-selling author Harry Kraus, MD, is a board-certified surgeon whose contemporary fiction (beginning with 1994’s Stainless Steal Hearts and including his 2001 best-seller Could I Have This Dance?) is characterized by medical realism. He practices surgery in Virginia and formerly in Kenya where he served as a missionary surgeon. He’s also the author of two works of nonfiction.

I received a complimentary copy of The Six-Liter Club by Harry Kraus from Glass Road PR. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned novel.

Photobucket

Filed Under: Book Tour Tagged With: , , ,

Guest Author: Deborah Noyes

Thursday 10 June, 2010 By 1 Comment

Pixie-Led: The Lure of Lore

I’m learning that one of my favorite themes to explore in a narrative is narrative, story in its own right, which for me includes the literature of childhood: fairy tales, fantasy, myths, and folklore.
Many of my books, especially my first historical novel, Angel and Apostle, are conversations with other writers.

But even in a novel like Captivity, which doesn’t owe its existence to favorite books or authors (though it nods to William Blake and Walt Whitman), I’m often lured down paths that point to story in all its forms, from nursery rhymes to ghost lore.

Clara Gill, one of the two protagonists of Captivity, is science-minded, a skeptic, but she’s an artist, too. The influence of tales and their tellers on her worldview shows through her rational exterior. “The best stories belong to childhood,” admits Clara, who grew up on her housemaid’s tales of changelings and other faerie mischief, even as her surrogate uncle, Sir Artemus Lever, taught her the myths of classical Greece and Rome.

At one point Artemus equates Clara with his namesake. To the ancient Greeks, he confides, Artemus was goddess of the hunt and the animals, “a wild thing who begged her father never to make her marry… who would traipse through the forest with her lop-eared hounds and never answer to a soul.”

When Clara first meets Will Cross, the unsuitable (and doomed) object of her young affections, she claims to “know this moment in her own story. She’s being pixie-led into a wood where he’ll feed her treats with lovely long fingers and she’ll forget her name and how to get home again, for perfectly virtuous and otherwise clever girls are led astray in just this way and ruined daily…”

In middle age, Clara finds herself narrating the myth of the prophetic old sea god, Proteus, in her sketchbook. Proteus shifted shape to elude those who would have him tell their futures, and to reveal him, Clara, a zoological artist, furiously draws creature after creature. The god takes many forms, but she outlasts him, and Proteus must finally show himself. “And so appears, like a wolf loping out of a fog, a man’s face. Not the gnarled old sea god — eyes sunk in their webs of flesh, the stained ivory of a foot-long beard — but a beloved face unfurling against her will, frightening for its likeness.” The face belongs to young Will Cross, who belongs in Clara’s past, not her future.

Even the traditional ballad Will cites (we know it today as “Scarborough Fair”) is a play on British faerie lore, about an elfin prince who invites a maiden to more or less achieve the impossible, teasing, “and then you will be a true a lover of mine.”

These are only a handful of the stories within the story, but for me, tales, myths, and folklore — together with history — act as narrative fuel. I stray down those paths gladly.

~ Deborah Noyes

About the Author:

Angel and Apostle is Deborah Noyes’ first novel. Her short fiction and reviews have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Boston Sunday Globe, Seventeen, The Washington Post Book World, The Chicago Sun-Times, Stories, The Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, The Bloomsbury Review, Boston Review, and other publications. She has also written and edited numerous books for children and young adults, including the award-winning teen anthology Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales.

My sincere gratitude to author Deborah Noyes for taking the time to write a post for my blog. I also would like to thank Unbridled Books for making this post a possibility.

Photobucket

Filed Under: Guest Author Tagged With: ,

Book Review: Captivity by Deborah Noyes

Thursday 10 June, 2010 By 1 Comment

Title: Captivity
Author: Deborah Noyes
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Publication Date: June 1, 2010
Hardcover: 352 pages
ISBN: 978-1936071630
Genre: Historical Fiction

Photobucket

About the Book:

This masterful historical novel by Deborah Noyes, the lauded author of Angel & Apostle, The Ghosts of Kerfol, and Encyclopedia of the End (starred PW) is two stories:
The first centers upon the strange, true tale of the Fox Sisters, the enigmatic family of young women who, in upstate New York in 1848, proclaimed that they could converse with the dead. Doing so, they unwittingly (but artfully) gave birth to a religious movement that touched two continents: the American Spiritualists. Their followers included the famous and the rich, and their effect on American spirituality lasted a full generation. Still, there are echoes. The Fox Sisters’ is a story of ambition and playfulness, of illusion and fear, of indulgence, guilt and finally self-destruction.
The second story in Captivity is about loss and grief. It is the evocative tale of the bright promise that the Fox Sisters offer up to the skeptical Clara Gill, a reclusive woman of a certain age who long ago isolated herself with her paintings, following the scandalous loss of her beautiful young lover in London.
Lyrical and authentic—and more than a bit shadowy—Captivity is, finally, a tale about physical desire and the hope that even the thinnest faith can offer up to a darkening heart.

My Review:

Captivity by Deborah Noyes is a stroke of literary genius and written unlike any other novel I have read, which captures and at the same time commands the reader’s attention to even the smallest of details. A highly philosophical novel, Captivity must be savoured in small quantities and thought about before the reader can proceed further with the novel. Noyes’ writing captures the era, the sites, sounds, and beliefs of a time long past. In Captivity, based on the historical Fox sisters and the fictionalized Clara Gill and with brilliant creative license, Noyes’ characters are written in such a manner that they become quite real to the reader. The story takes place in 1840s New York, toggles back and forth between the Fox Sisters and Clara Gill’s life, at times intersecting, while other times Clara’s narrative takes the reader back to England when she still went out and was relatively carefree and in love. The Fox sisters, Leah, Maggie and Kate have a gift, referred to as knocking, that allows them to commune with the dead. Naturally, due to the times, there were many who believed but many who did not believe and felt at they very least they were committing fraud. The Fox sisters go through a series of committees and public hearings and are found innocent of all counts of fraud, yet each time the public demands yet another committee. All the while the Fox Sisters, whether knowing it or not are beginning a new phenomenon in America. Meanwhile, a scandal occurred in England forcing Clara and her father to flee into relative obscurity, settling in New York. Clara, indulged by her father is so reclusive she rarely even leaves the safety of her room. What secret binds Clara and her father so close, yet so distant? What cruelty has occurred in Clara’s past to cause a once enthusiastic woman to choose to seclude herself within her darkened room with only her memories, her seashells, and her sketches? When Maggie is sent to help in the Gill residence, is it a kindred soul she sees in Clara Gill, if not, how else can one explain Maggie’s repeated attempts to draw Clara Gill out, literally and figuratively? While it may appear as though I have given the entirety of the novel away, rest assured I have not even begun to touch the depth and breadth of this extraordinary novel. Noyes has created a deeply profound and at times quite philosophical novel, which lends itself to contemplation and would make for a brilliant discussion group novel. Captivity is in a class all its own. The distinctive narratives and relationships are masterfully crafted and are seamlessly interwoven until the story reads as a singular novel rather than several tributaries, which make up the whole. My words cannot do justice to this work of literary genius and it is my fervent hope that Deborah Noyes is working on yet her next literary masterpiece.

About the Author:

Angel and Apostle is Deborah Noyes’ first novel. Her short fiction and reviews have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Boston Sunday Globe, Seventeen, The Washington Post Book World, The Chicago Sun-Times, Stories, The Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, The Bloomsbury Review, Boston Review, and other publications. She has also written and edited numerous books for children and young adults, including the award-winning teen anthology Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales.

I received a complimentary copy of Captivity by Deborah Noyes from Unbridled Books. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned novel.

Photobucket

Filed Under: A Book review Tagged With: , , ,