Let's Talk about the RARI 2009 book

The Nominating Committee of Reading Across RI is busy reading books for the 2009 selection from the list of over seventy titles nominated this year by readers all over the state. Join in the discussion of the ten books on the 2009 Short List by posting your comments about these books (each title has its own post):

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Climbing the Stairs by Padma Venkatraman
Trudy's Promise by Marcia Preston
Prisoner of Tehran by Marina Nemat
Song Yet Sung by James McBride
The Nightbirds by Thomas Maltman
The Girls: A Novel by Lori Lansens
The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
Five Skies by Ron Carlson
Behind the Scenes of the Museum by Kate Atkinson

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
NoveList Summary: Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.

Climbing the Stairs by Padma Venkatraman

Climbing the Stairs by Padma Venkatraman
NoveList Summary: In India, in 1941, when her father becomes brain-damaged in a non-violent protest march, fifteen-year-old Vidya and her family are forced to move in with her father's extended family and become accustomed to a totally different way of life.

Trudy's Promise by Marcia Preston

Trudy's Promise by Marcia Preston
Booklist Review: An act of desperation divides a mother and her child. Only an act of faith can reunite them. Trudy Hulst has no idea if her husband survived his attempted escape past the newly constructed Berlin Wall. But she knows too well the consequences of his actions. Now branded the wife of a defector, she faces a life in prison. With no real choice, she is forced to follow, praying she can find a way to claim their child once she's in West Berlin. Trudy survives a harrowing break for freedom...only to learn her husband was shot during his escape. Alone, she wanders the wall like a ghost, living for brief glimpses of her son, now out of reach behind barbed wire and armed soldiers. Desperate to regain her child, Trudy begins a journey that leads her to America, where she continues an odyssey of hope to find her son.

Prisoner of Tehran by Marina Nemat

Prisoner of Tehran by Marina Nemat
Booklist Review: In Tehran in the early 1980s, after she leads a strike in high school to get her math teacher to teach calculus not politics, Marina, 16, a practicing Catholic, is locked up for two years and tortured with her school friends in the Ayatollah Khomeini's notorious Evin political prison. She is saved from execution by an interrogator, Ali, who wants to marry her and threatens to hurt her family and Catholic boyfriend, Andre, if she refuses. Forced to convert to Islam, she becomes Ali's wife; then he is assassinated by political rivals, and she rejoins her family and marries Andre. They immigrate to Canada in 1991. For more than 20 years, secure in her middle-class life, she keeps silent, until she writes this unforgettable memoir.

Song Yet Sung by James McBride

Song Yet Sung by James McBride
Booklist Review: Wounded and imprisoned in the Chesapeake Bay attic of vicious slave hunter Patty Stanton, Liz Spocott, 19, foresees the future and leads a breakout of 14 slaves, who are then hounded by hunters from many sides. With a strong focus on the role of women, the author recounts the history of slave revolts without sentimentality in a stirring novel of cruelty, betrayal, and courage, including the part played by the young slave who runs from a kind mistress and is determined to help Liz on the "gospel train to freedom."

The Nightbirds by Thomas Maltman

The Nightbirds by Thomas Maltman
Booklist Review: In 1862, led by Chief Little Crow and incited by the government’s failure to provide their annuity, the Dakota Sioux staged an uprising in Minnesota, slaughtering hundreds of settlers. As a result, 38 Dakota men were hanged, the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Maltman’s promising first novel bounces between the years leading up to this atrocity-laden conflict and 1876, when the James-Younger gang would stir up its own brand of bloody mayhem in Minnesota. Following the struggles of the Senger family, Maltman keeps the telling personal and local, tacked to the Sengers farm and the Dakota tribe situated a stones throw across the river.

The Girls: A Novel by Lori Lansens

The Girls: A Novel by Lori Lansens
Booklist Review: Lansen’s remarkable second novel is told from two viewpoints: that of Rose and that of Ruby Darlen, 29-year-old conjoined twins. A recent medical diagnosis has spurred Rose to write her autobiography, and she encourages Ruby to do the same. Between the two sections, the story of their lives is revealed, beginning with their birth to an unwed teen mother and their adoption by Lovey Darlen, the nurse who was with their mother when she was in labor, and her strong, silent husband, Stash.

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
Novelist Summary: Taking refuge in fairy tales after the loss of his mother, twelve-year-old David finds himself violently propelled into an imaginary land in which the boundaries of fantasy and reality are disturbingly melded.

Five Skies by Ron Carlson

Five Skies by Ron Carlson
Novelist Summary: Working together on a summer construction project high in the Rocky Mountains, drifter Arthur Key, shiftless Ronnie Panelli, and foreman Darwin Gallegos reveal details about their pasts and beliefs in cautious and profound ways.

Behind the Scenes of the Museum by Kate Atkinson

Behind the Scenes of the Museum by Kate Atkinson
Novelist Summary: Ruby, born in York, England, in 1959, relates the story of her family living above shops in the 1960s and of her grandmother and mother living through the earlier wars.