Emma Jean’s Bad Behavior by Charlotte Rains Dixon is an appropriately titled romp opening with best-selling author Emma Jean Sullivan pitching her latest novel, “The Winemaker’s Wife.”  Readers quickly get a sense of Emma Jean’s self-centered character during a book signing.  She alternately gushes to fans in her affected Southern accent or snaps at them, including turning on a customer with a crying child.  Unfortunately, Emma’s newest novel isn't selling quite as robustly as her previous novels.  This she attributes in part to an Oxford Review article that calls her narrative snarky, among other less charitable adjectives.   Her “bad behavior”—rudeness to staff, store patrons, and fans—takes a turn for the worse when she falls at first sight for a fan’s husband, who is buying the book for his wife.  A brief but torrid affair follows, which forces Emma Jean to reconsider her long-held “baby hater” reputation. 

Emma Jean’s “bad behavior” isn’t limited to rudeness and unfaithfulness to her husband.  After determining that she should try to be kinder to people (in response to the snarkiness review) and that she should cultivate a best friend (after mentally polling her acquaintances and discovering that none of them currently qualified), she turns on a writing student while under the influence of a few glasses of complimentary wine on her plane home.  Unfortunately, her sharing that the student’s memoir was likely fabricated leads to an expose that beleaguers Emma Jean’s student, whose book has topped the best-seller list. 

As Emma Jean’s idyllic life unravels spectacularly—her book sales flounder, she learns that she’s pregnant by her lover and not her husband, her bank account is dwindling as her soon-to-be-ex-husband spends her money for his new wine business, and her lover leaves her—she flails about for help.  Emma turns to her Aunt Cleo, who raised her after her mother was killed running with the bulls, and relocates to help her aunt in her art gallery business.  New characters are introduced into her life who seem willing to reach out to Emma Jean—something she is unaccustomed to.  As Emma Jean learns to give more than to receive, Emma Jean’s good behavior brings her healing and reunion with the people she loves. 

Dixon has written more than a spicy romance.  Emma Jean is smart, with colorful analogies, and a redemptive story line for a character that readers may not like very much in the first few chapters.  After all, she does demonstrate astoundingly bad behavior and has character flaws galore.  However, “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” is a suitable theme for this work, since Emma seems to fall short of the high standards she continuously set for those around her, and when she was finally able to forgive herself and others for their faults, Emma found herself surrounded by the people she valued most.  

Emma Jean's Bad Behavior was published in 2013 by Vagabondage Press.  

The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow, by Rita Leganski

The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow, by Rita Leganski, is the story of Bonaventure Arrow, a baby boy born mute to the newly widowed Dancy Arrow.  Bonaventure doesn't make a sound, but his hearing is astounding—he can hear the tiniest sounds far, far away, sounds of colors, or sounds of events that had happened long ago.  It is his supernatural hearing that helps him identify his father’s murderer. 

Bright, thoughtful, and spirited, Bonaventure’s unique abilities seem almost believable as he communicates with his father, William Arrow, now in Almost Heaven.  Dancy Arrow’s young husband is murdered before Bonaventure is born by a man Leganski calls “The Wanderer.”  The shooting seems random and unplanned, carried out by an unstable and damaged man who has no identification and is unable to communicate sensibly after his arrest.  William’s mother is unable to rest until the murderer’s identity is known, and when the police are unsuccessful, she hires a private detective. 

In the meantime, Dancy wallows in her grief, raising Bonaventure with the help of William’s mother and their hired help, Trinidad Prefontaine.  Trinidad is their cook and housekeeper, and has knowledge of hoodoo—the use of charms and plants to bring about good fortune.   She is inexplicably connected to Bonaventure, but as the family secrets unravel and the murderer’s identity is revealed, readers will learn about this connection and others which will bring release for William and healing to those who grieve. 

The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow was published in 2012 by HarperCollins.  

Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O'Nan

Last Night at the Lobster, is another Stewart O’Nan gem.  O’Nan has the ability to portray life as it is, with all its warts--disappointments, unhappiness, irrational ire, and even bad weather—but also with  its beauty marks—lasting friends, the love of someone special, the care of a stranger, and good luck.  Only 160 pages long, Last Night at the Lobster is another example of O'Nan's ability to tell a story that feels real.      

Manny DeLeon is the manager of a Red Lobster restaurant which is slated to close.  As with any business taking its dying breaths, employees have either found other employment and resigned or simply disappeared in search of new opportunities.  Others leave angry and resentful, taking out their frustration on the long-suffering manager.  Manny is left with a skeleton crew on a snowy night, the last night of the restaurant’s existence, with little or no business.  Any former and current restaurant employee will appreciate the situations that arise, and those who haven’t worked in a restaurant will gain a new appreciation for the professionals who work there.  More than that, readers will appreciate Manny’s calm leadership and sense of responsibility. 

Manny is dedicated to the end, saving only a few souvenirs but taking nothing of value, working multiple stations in the place of missing employees, and rallying the troops to make it through to an early close.  We learn much about Manny’s character through his relationship with his pregnant girlfriend and one of his waitresses, with whom he had an affair—and how he accepts his duty—to close the restaurant that had been his to care for, to help find jobs for his employees, and return to his girlfriend. 

Last Night at the Lobster was published in 2007 by Viking.  

Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter

Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter, is a delightful surprise.  A reader might discount the potential for a meaningful plot line and well-developed characters when introduced to the young and ambitious producer’s assistant Claire and her porn-addicted boyfriend.  Fortunately, the author introduces Pasquale, an innkeeper in the tiny oceanside town of Porto Vergogna, Italy, in the book’s first chapter.

Pasquale is a young Italian dreamer, son of the only hotel’s innkeeper, who inherits the property after the death of his father.  Pasquale aches to build the property into a resort, complete with a mountainside tennis court, which will attract famous and wealthy Americans to the tiny town and mostly nonexistent beach.   When a Hollywood starlet arrives under unusual circumstances, he falls in love with her during her short visit.    

Dee Moray is cast in a minor role in the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton film “Cleopatra” but leaves the set when she is diagnosed with stomach cancer.  Sent to Porto Vergogna to remove her from the attention of Burton, Moray learns that it was not a tumor that she has but a baby, and the film’s PR head, Michael Deane, conspires to remove Dee as a distraction to Burton since movie fans were enjoying the fiery relationship between the film’s lead stars. 

Stitched between modern day and the early 1960s, Pasquale and Moray lead separate lives which are eventually reunited through the help of Claire, Michael Deane’s assistant, and an aspiring screenplay writer.   Both Pasquale and Dee learn to accept what’s possible and what isn’t—like building a tennis court on the side of a mountain or luring Richard Burton away from Liz Taylor—but are still able to  find enrichment in the families they built while away from each other. 

Walter does a masterful job telling a story about making things right, healing old wounds, and coping with events that are outside of our control.  The characters are likable and grow in the face of challenges.  Beautiful Ruins is a moving story, and was published in 2012 by HarperCollins. 

Canada, by Richard Ford

Canada, by Richard Ford, is the story of Del Parsons, who was abandoned at age 15 after his parents decided to rob a bank.  Del is eventually transported across the border to Canada, where most of the plot unfolds.  It’s there that Del learns about life—he is exposed to his benefactor’s mental illness, becomes an unwilling accomplice to murder, and reflects on how his parents’ flaws formed his and his sister’s lives. 

Del is one of a set of twins, his sister being the larger of the two, more worldly, and less timid than Del.  Del’s father Bev left the military after an under-the-table deal selling beef was discovered, and subsequent stints as a car salesman weren’t successful enough to keep him out of the black market business.  When a deal goes bad and Bev is left with a substantial debt to pay, the notion of a bank robbery takes root in his mind.  His wife Neeva (who characterizes herself as “weak” in her diary) agrees to be his accomplice.  The robbery is not as successful as Bev had hoped, and resulted in his and Neeva’s arrest several days later.  Del and his sister Berner are left alone in the house, and after a day or two, Berner decides to strike out on her own, presumably to follow a boyfriend to California.  A friend of Neeva’s arrives later and takes Del to her brother’s hotel in a small town in Canada. 

Canada encompasses a broad range of emotions.  Bev’s romance with becoming a bank robber after his bumbling attempts at selling meat to a railroad buyer is wryly comical.  Neeva is miserable in her marriage, feeling like she is blown about by circumstance, from her obligation to marry Bev because she was pregnant to participating in the bank robbery.  Del is abandoned, more or less, after his parents’ arrest, and experiences more than a 15-year-old should be exposed to, which the reader senses makes him emotionally aloof. 

Ford, whose previous book Independence Day, won the Pulitzer Prize and the Pen/Faulkner Award, has another award-worthy novel in Canada.  Canada was published in 2012 by Ecco.  

The Orchardist, by Amanda Coplin

The Orchardist, by Amanda Coplin, is a novel about a lonely orchardist who enters into a tenuous relationship as caregiver for two runaway, pregnant teens.  After Jane and Della take up residence in his apple and apricot orchards, Talmadge discovers the reason for their flight—a cruel hermit who enslaves and tortures young girls and women.  Only one child of the two girls survives, Angelene, whom Talmadge raises with the help of Miss Caroline Middey.  (Coplin almost always refers to Talmadge soley by his last name and Miss Caroline Middey almost always by both names and title.) 

After the tragic demise of Della’s babies and Jane’s suicide, Della seems incapable of raising her niece, Angelene.  In fact, she is plagued by a desire to flee, to do something dangerous, to tempt fate.  The narratives of her life after leaving the orchard are fraught with near disasters, while Angelene lives in the safe and placid orchard. 

Coplin’s characters are complex.  Talmadge is haunted by the death of his mother but mostly by the disappearance of his sister when they were both youths.  His obsession with bringing Della back into the fold at the orchard speaks to his desire to find and reunite his lost family.  Della is damaged beyond recovery by the hand of her enslaver, and despite Talmadge’s efforts, cannot keep from creating her own undoing.  The pace of the novel is often slow, echoing the tone of life in the orchard.  When the action reaches a climax, Coplin speeds through the scene at a nearly chaotic pace, so that readers need the interjected newspaper accounts to help understand what actually occurred. 

Coplin recreates the life of the orchardist well in her novel, having grown up on her grandfather’s orchard in Washington.  Along with the historic elements of the novel—the coming of the railroad, the growth in industrialized harvesting and shipping practices—readers will sense Coplin’s sincerity and honesty.  The Orchardist was published in 2012 by HarperCollins. 

The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan, is a cautionary tale about the dust storms that swept the great grasslands of the United States in the 1930s.  Egan interweaves the stories of individual settlers, immigrants, homestead-seekers, and displaced city folks, with the history of the former Native American lands in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Nebraska. 

Thousands relocated to the grasslands in the early 1930s seeking a new life, lured by false promises of vibrant new cities, rich land, and abundant water.  Few arrived to much more than flat grasslands fit for grazing, which formerly fed bison.  Many of those who arrived set out to tame the grassland into farms and for a time, were successful raising crops while rain still came.  With their newfound prosperity built on rising grain prices, the settlers moved from dugouts and makeshift shelters to real homes, bought luxuries, and enjoyed a comfortable life. 

But grain prices dropped, the rain stopped coming, and a years-long drought cast a pall on the growing communities.  Temperatures that varied with the seasons from baking to bitterly cold combined with harsh winds to whip the soil into huge, rolling dust storms, with enough static electricity to kill small animals and crops.  What were once acres of cultivated fields now looked like sand dunes, with the dust defeating all efforts to keep it out of their homes.  Farmers began to suffer from “dust pneumonia” as their lungs struggled to breathe through dust that made visibility so low that during the height of storms, it was impossible to see at all.  Settlers died in their yards, smothered by the dust, unable to see well enough to find the shelter of their own home.   

Neighboring states were unreceptive to farmers who tried to relocate there.  The country’s economy was struggling everywhere, but the plight of the dust bowl farmer was too distant to spur the nation’s lawmakers into action--that is, until the dust clouds reached the capital.  Efforts more serious that the rainmakers hired by locals had greater effect—in particular, the soil conservation initiatives that sought to change the way the land was used and cultivated.  With a collective effort by many landowners, some of the land could be reclaimed so that dust storms were less frequent.   

There are lessons to be learned from Egan’s book that are applicable to finite natural resources other than the prairie grass and soil it protected.  His book is well researched and empathetic to all parties—those who encouraged settlement as well as those who turned the prairie grass into ill-fated fields.  The Worst Hard Time won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2006, and was first published by Houghton Mifflin in 2005. 

Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver

In Barbara Kingsolver’s most recent novel, "Flight Behavior," she interweaves a natural aberration with her character’s struggle for freedom. The tenuous life cycle of the Monarch butterfly and the life of Kingsolver’s central character share many characteristics: a displacement to an unforgiving environment, an unlikely opportunity to flourish, and an opportunity to escape, along with a colorful appearance—fiery orange wings and fiery red hair. Dellarobia, the story’s heroine, describes herself as having skipped the frosted pink lipstick of innocent teenage girls, “heading straight for Immoral Coral and Come-to-Bed Red.” Trapped into an early marriage by an unplanned pregnancy Dellarobia struggled to live the life she’d chosen, with overbearing in-laws nearby and no clear means of escape.

Dellarobia, the unhappy wife of Cub (son of Bear), lives in the rural mountains of Tennessee in a community called Feathertown. Dellarobia and Cub live hand to mouth, subsisting on his meager take-home pay, while raising two small children, shopping at the second-hand store, and splurging on shakes at the local fast food restaurant. Dellarobia is considering leaving Cub when she sees an amazing sight—the trees on the mountain behind their home “on fire” but not burning—millions of Monarch butterflies roosting in the trees. This makes her home not only a tourist attraction, but the hallowed site of a religious awakening, the center of an anti-logging campaign, and the draw for an intriguing scientist and his crew.

Ovid Byron sees Dellarobia’s natural penchant for science and detail, and enlists her help in leading teams of volunteers who count and catalog the data from butterfly research. The troubling element is the butterflies’ appearance in Tennessee at all, since their usual migratory routes are much further away. Ovid hypothesizes that the butterflies are doomed, since temperatures in the mountains of Tennessee would be too harsh to support them. In the meantime, Dellarobia is entranced by Ovid and the breadth of potential he sees in her, and battles to protect her privacy from the onslaught of national media and sort out the scientific from the superstitious.

Flight, escape, and survival are repeated themes throughout the book, as well as birth and death. Kingsolver’s descriptions are spot on. She describes a congregation singing an old time hymn like they were “dragging it like a plow through heavy clay.” Dellarobia’s “every possession was either unbreakable, or broken.” She masterfully describes Dellarobia’s environment in a way that helps readers feel her frustration while dramaticizing the effect of potential climate change.

"Flight Behavior" was published in 2012 by Harper Collins.

The 44 Scotland Street Series, by Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith is something of a marvel among authors. He isn't the author of a book series, he is the author of at least four series of books, in addition to multiple other novels, story collections, and children's books. And while a reader might expect the quality of the novels to be lacking, the complexity of the story lines and the plots of the novels are well developed and engaging.

The 44 Scotland Street series is an example of Smith's storytelling ability. Set in Edinburgh, Scotland, the novels focus on inhabitants of the flats at 44 Scotland Street and their friends. Domenica is a widowed anthropologist, Bruce is a surveyor, and Irene is the ambitious mother of six-year-old Bertie. Pat, who rents a room from Bruce and is on a break from her university studies, works for Matthew, an art dealer. Angus, who is a portrait painter and friends with Domenica, frequents Big Lou's coffee shop near Matthew's art gallery.

Although the pace of action is fairly slow--keep in mind that these books were written as serial novels and originally published chapter by chapter in a newspaper--topics are deeper than one might expect. Discussions of free will, politics, relationships, art, and poetry are interspersed with the everyday activities of the characters, so that readers gain a sense of life in Edinburgh while getting to know them.

And the characters inspire emotion. For example, Bertie's "space" is painted pink (his mother wants him to disassociate colors from gender), he attends yoga and psychotherapy (which he dislikes), is nearly fluent in Italian from taking weekly lessons, and is ready to test for an advanced level in tenor saxophone. He complains that he doesn't have time to play, so his mother arranges for weekly play dates with a girl from his school whom he dislikes. Smith relates that Bertie is one character whom he is often asked about, with readers desiring some relief for him from his mother's rigid schedule.

The 44 Scotland Street series is engaging and easy to pick up between other books. There are currently eight books in the series, beginning with "44 Scotland Street" and the most current edition, "Sunshine on Scotland Street." Smith's other series include The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, The Sunday Philosophy Club, and Corduroy Mansions. His books are published by Little Brown.

The Roots of the Olive Tree, by Courtney Miller Santo

The Roots of the Olive Tree, by Courtney Miller Santo, tells the story of 112-year-old Anna Davison Keller, taken from her birth mother in Australia, and moved to California by the Davison family.  Anna’s father dreamed of olive trees thriving in the Sacramento Valley and building a fortune on its fruits.  As he succeeded, generations of Keller women made their home at the Hill House, where Anna lived, including Anna’s daughter Bets, Bets’ daughter Callie, Callie’s daughter Deb, and Deb’s daughter Erin. 

Santo’s book is like a series of snapshots into the women’s lives.  We learn that Anna wants to be the oldest living person, and scours the newspapers to check on the health of anyone older.  Bets’ husband Frank suffers from dementia, and long held secrets they both have are revealed in time.  Callie wants to start a new life and sell her Olive Pit roadside store.  Deb, imprisoned for the murder of her husband, finally makes parole but has trouble adapting to life at Hill House.  Erin, Deb’s daughter, is an opera singer who returns from a European tour pregnant and troubled. 

Because of Anna’s advanced age, she is one of a group of supercentenarians studied by scientist Amrit Hashmi, who is seeking to prove his theory that old age is environmental and not genetic, at least for people like Anna.  He arrives to interview the family and take DNA for further study.  These results reveal family secrets long hidden.  And, his involvement sparks a romance with Callie. 

The story is not always pleasant to read.  Inexplicable angry exchanges and explosive reactions between generations belie a history that isn't described in the book.  Because there are so many characters, who seem to get equal attention as story protagonists, the depth of their development may not give the reader a full picture to better understand their motivations.  Perhaps this story rings more true to people like the author, who is proud of five living generations in her own family. 

The Roots of the Olive Tree was written in 2012 and published by William Morrow.